tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84570675609685975982017-08-11T16:20:13.862+01:00Howard Cooper's BlogJewish interest stuff from a rabbi and psychotherapistHoward Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.comBlogger151125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-67760863972642645592017-07-16T11:01:00.002+01:002017-07-16T11:06:56.989+01:00Developing a Spirit of Independent-Mindedness<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">How would you feel if you went to a synagogue or church and the service was led by a robot? if the words and the music had been machine generated? (Some of you may already think you have such a figure in your community, but stay with me). You could programme a machine to lead services, to give sermons, Rabbi Google can teach you about Judaism even now. Your robot minister could listen and talk to you if you had a pastoral problem. Machines can do all these things already. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In Germany they have just unveiled a robot-priest in the Protestant Church called – can you guess? – “BlessU-2”. It has a touch-screen chest, two arms and a head. You can choose to be blessed in German, English, French, Spanish or Polish. You can choose a male or female voice. The robot pastor raises its arms, flashes lights, and recites the Biblical verse “May God bless you and protect you”. &nbsp;If you want, you can press the screen and get a print-out of the words. In case of malfunction or breakdown, the Church has invested in a backup robot. ‘</span><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">O brave new world, That has such pastors in it’ (as Shakespeare almost said). &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">This may be the future - who knows? -&nbsp; but the point of the church’s experiment is to provoke debate, which it has done. We all know – or think we know – the difference between a machine and a person, even if we sometimes end up treating other people as machines. But what does it mean to be human? We talk, casually, about the ‘human spirit’ but it is a mystery, this thing we call consciousness. The Book of Genesis tries to capture the extraordinary nature of what it means to be a person, to be alive, to be animated (that word of course is from the Latin ‘<i>anima</i>/spirit’). In the Biblical myth, the inanimate, as-yet-not-quite-human, <i>Adam</i>,&nbsp; made of dust, inert matter, <i>Adamah</i>, becomes a <i>nefesh chaya</i> , a living being, &nbsp;by having the breath of life breathed into it by the divine spirit (Genesis 2:7). That’s one, poetic, way of imagining what a human being is. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">But in spite of all the amazing neuroscience and genetic understanding and the insights from biology and chemistry, and all the knowledge we have about what makes a human being human, what still remains elusive is the problem - the philosophers call it the ‘hard problem’ - of what consciousness is, what this human spirit in us is. I think this is going to remain a tantalising question for a long time yet: apart from these amazing neural connections up here in our heads, in this ‘three pounds of jelly’ as the great neurologist Oliver Sacks once called the brain, what is it that makes us an aware, spirited human being? &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Whatever this mysterious essence is, it does define the difference between us and a robot, however sophisticated a machine that is, however many millions of calculations per second it can make. We can live in awe of what humanity can now build. Our smartphones are smarter than us. That’s awesome. But it is nothing like the awe of what it is to be human, a living being. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Our Torah text this week describes the qualities of Joshua, Moses’ successor. &nbsp;Moses is told “Take Joshua, the son of Nun, a man who has spirit/<i>ruach</i> in him, and place your hand upon him...and give him instructions in the sight of the whole community...” (Numbers 27:18-20). This is a bit puzzling if you think about it. Surely everyone has <i>ruach</i> in them – spirit. This is what makes them human – the spirit animating human flesh. The poetry of the earliest verses of Genesis (1:2) describes the spirit of God – the <i>ruach Elohim</i> – generating, animating, all of life, moving through all creation, breathing life into us too. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Ruach </span></i></span><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">&nbsp;means breath, and wind, and spirit. It’s tangible and it’s intangible, it’s the energy that keeps everything going and it’s a metaphor for the energy that keeps everything going. So what is the text inviting us to think about when it describes the next leader of the community after Moses as a person who has <i>ruach</i>, spirit, in them? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Remember that Joshua is the person who returned from spying out the promised land with a positive report, unlike the majority view of the 10 other spies who were frightened about their futures. They came back and said to the Israelites: we went there and we were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, the cities are huge, the people are fierce, we’ll never prevail there, let’s get back to Egypt where at least we knew what the next day would bring. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">But Joshua, along with Caleb, give a minority report: &nbsp;they didn’t follow the consensus, the group-think, they are independent-minded, they offer an Obama-esque ‘Yes, we can’: &nbsp;we can overcome the forces ranged against us. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">We had that story a few chapters ago and now we arrive at the text where &nbsp;Joshua is described as having spirit within him, <i>ruach</i>. So is it suggesting that this is what makes him a potential leader? That he’s not an automaton? that he’s not pre-programmed? that he’s not robotic? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Do we intuit here something vital being shown to us through these stories, these legends, about leadership?&nbsp; The importance of being able to really think for oneself, not succumbing to one’s fears, not being an automatic machine-like follower of the views of majority opinion? Is it this spirit of independent-mindedness what makes you someone who can lead, who can inspire, who can animate others, breathe new life into them and stop them becoming petrified, stuck, robotic, soulless?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">This notion of independent-mindedness is complicated: I’m not talking about just being contrary, bloody-minded - just because you dissent from majority views doesn’t mean you are filled with the spirit of wise leadership.&nbsp; I wouldn’t describe climate change deniers as independent-minded voices dissenting from the scientific consensus, but head-in-the-sand, and often self-serving, deniers of reality. Similarly, Brexiteer politicians dissenting from the extensive majority view of informed opinion and expertise, across many fields, &nbsp;that says that leaving the EU will be culturally, economically and socially disastrous, a form of national self-harm – well, that spirit of independent-mindedness seems to some of us just delusional. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">So the question is: &nbsp;when do you dissent from a majority view? And when do you support a majority view? The point about independent-mindedness is your capacity to bring together in yourself thinking and feeling, to be able to research, and reflect , to listen with an open mind, to weigh up multiple possibilities, to ponder over inconsistencies, to allow doubt to be part of the fabric of your thinking. Like <i>ruach</i> – breathe, wind, spirit – this spirit of independent-mindedness &nbsp;is always in motion. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">It’s a gift to be animated by the spirit, and it requires work not to let your spirit atrophy, or go into eclipse. Sometimes it means learning from the wisdom of youth. And their directness: “Being religious means believing in a culture and a community that bonds over morals and values” – when I hear a young woman at her Bat Mitzvah sharing this thought I can see that she’s understood something that many so-called adults never understand: the recognition that being ‘religious’ is not about whether you believe in a divine being in some form or another, a god of one kind or another - that’s the majority view, the automatic view, the robotic view. No, being religious is about connecting yourself to a way of thinking and living, a culture, a heritage, committed to actions guided by moral values and ethics...<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">...the Jewish ethical stance towards justice is designed particularly to protect those who are vulnerable - who because of poverty or social status, or being an outsider, or a refugee, or marginalised in some other way, might not be treated with fairness or respect by the powers that be.&nbsp; So, recent cuts in legal aid which mean citizens are denied access to justice, politicians who wish us to leave the European Court of Justice, government plans to scrap the Human Rights Act (rights developed after the atrocities of the second world war and designed to protect us all from oppression by holding the state to account) - all of these attacks on the principles of running a just society run counter to Jewish ethical principles...<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">...We have all witnessed recently the kind of horrors that can occur if a society fails to live out its highest moral and ethical principles – the fire at Grenfell Tower, with the burning alive of poor people just yards away from some of the country’s most pricey homes. We know this was not just, straightforwardly, a tragedy for those involved and their families, but a &nbsp;terrible indictment of a whole set of current attitudes and shabby values: safety regulations are not a luxury, they are a moral necessity - but the mantra of deregulation fails to recognise that; in addition, the privatisation of lower-income property management means that people have to deal with unresponsive companies rather than local authorities whose officials can be voted out (and without legal aid any legal challenge to private companies becomes prohibitively expensive); also, if austerity means cutting housing officers and safety inspectors then you are putting money above morality; all of this is self-evident if you look at society through a Judaeo-Christian ethical lens. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Our sacred texts offer a perspective on these kind of issues that a society ignores at its peril: there’s a huge social inequality that runs through this country like an open wound and I don’t think you have to be a Biblical prophet to realise that a society that allows this to happen has lost its <i>raison d’</i></span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">ê</span><span class="st1"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">tre</span></i></span><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> and its very soul. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Leadership requires a spirit a independent-mindedness, an ability to avoid automatically following the populist view, the view of what Ibsen called ‘the compact majority’. How we each develop that capacity within us is a spiritual task. But without it we are lost. </span></span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br /><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></span><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><b>[adapted and extracted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, July 15th, 2017]</b></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-64660527725190479402017-07-05T14:43:00.002+01:002017-07-05T14:43:56.996+01:00New Rabbis, New Challenges: from Sinai to Kafka, and beyond <span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Last weekend I had the privilege, the honour, of addressing the graduating rabbinic students of the Leo Baeck College at the College’s annual Ordination service and ceremony. The ceremony is known as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">semikhah</i>and is rooted in an ancient tradition of rabbinic teachers passing on authority to the next generation of students through a ceremony of ‘laying on of hands’. This rabbinic tradition is itself traced back symbolically to the way in which Moses appointed Joshua as his successor to lead the Israelite community (Numbers 27:15-23). <o:p></o:p></span></span><br /> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I received <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">semikhah</i> in 1980. (The rabbi who ordained me happened to be seated next to me on Sunday). That seems a world away in both time and in the ethos of the times, and when I came to think about what I wanted to speak about to the graduating class of 2017 ( four women and three men) I found myself thinking about the extraordinary challenges not just Jewish communities will be facing in the next decades, but challenges all of us in Europe will be facing. What will a new generation of rabbis need to find within themselves? These new Jewish leaders will be asked to teach in, and minister to, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>communities in circumstances quite different, I felt, from the challenges rabbis have faced in the last 40 years. What follows here is an edited version of the address I offered the graduating class and the assembled gathering of family, friends and congregants who came together at West London Synagogue to celebrate this special occasion. I was grateful to the students for asking me. And grateful to the Leo Baeck College for acceding to their request. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>**</span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You all know the parable, Kafka’s numinous midrash: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I gave orders for my horse to be brought round from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call, I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing.</i> Each one of you has heard this call, this summons, addressed to you, when others may have heard nothing – or doubted your hearing of it - and it took you eventually on your journey to the Leo Baeck College, and into the rabbinate. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Kafka’s bugle (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trompete</i> in the original) is a close relative of the shofar, present at the revelation at Sinai when the Israelite community, our people, learn of the moral and ethical vision that it has been their burden and destiny to carry and try to enact. And just as at Sinai when the call went out and tradition says that each person heard it in their own way, according to their own character and personality, each one of you has heard that collective call in your own way, interpreted it, wrestled with it, questioned it, inhabited it, on this path into the rabbinate. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So you are inheritors of both mythopoeic traditions – one speaking of a call addressed to all the Jewish people that each one of you has been developing your own relationship to; the other speaking of a call that only you alone have heard. This dialogue, and dialectic, between these two traditions – between Sinai and modernity - will form and inform your future careers. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So, attuned to that call – for they are, at root, a single call - <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>what are you each going to do with it?<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> ’Where are you riding to, master?’ ‘I do not know’, I said, ‘only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.’ </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>On one level of course you know your destination [the communities in the UK and Europe in which they will serve]...but of course, in reality, ‘away from here’, none of you have any idea about your destinations. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the next 30 years, 40 years with strength, the timeframe (more or less) of your rabbinate, the world we have all grown up in, that you have grown up in and know, will increasingly come under strain. It’s been said that ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms can appear’ [Antonio Gramsci]. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>The signs of stress and fracture are all around us – the ‘morbid symptoms’.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What resources will you have – intellectual, emotional, spiritual – what resources will you bring, to this morbidity when it breaks apart the familiar world we feel so settled<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>within? What kind of Judaic hopefulness will you represent, enact? How will you stay attuned to that ancient call of the shofar that in our tradition also announces the possibility of, the coming of, a time of messianic transformation for humanity on our fragile planet? How– attuned to that call – how will you help your communities respond to - and those you work with adapt to - what might happen? How will you support them through the enormous changes people are facing in the world of work? how will you help them through <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>ethnic tensions, societal tensions? How will you guide them through in the face of some of the dark human impulses that have recently come to the fore, from the small-minded and mean-spirited to the murderous? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>How will you guide them through the consequences of the build-up of carbon in the air and nitrogen in the soil, the acidification of oceans and the desertification of once-fertile lands, as the Anthropocene age really takes a grip and globalisation and late capitalism increases the gaps between the haves and the have-nots? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Will you have the inner strength, the resilience, to resist colluding with the many modes of concealment of these realities, that prevent people taking effective action? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In these decades ahead the spiritual and Enlightenment values that you all embrace and embody in such an impressive way – open-minded, liberal, egalitarian, emotionally literate, intellectually clued-in – will come under pressure, we don’t know how severe, from regressive forces of intolerance and fear, communal rivalry and international conflict. What will you as Jewish leaders, Jewish religious leaders and thinkers, need to be saying? What are the Jewish truths that will keep you steady in a post-truth age? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How will you use the truths of Torah to inspire, to soothe, to heal - or to provoke – your communities? How will you help your communities keep their vision alive? their capacity to be attuned to the bugle’s call? How will you help them relate to the truths of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ha-Kadosh Baruch-Hu</i> – the Holy One of Israel – one of whose names is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Emet</i>/ truthfulness? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">‘You have no provisions with you,’ he said. ‘I need none,’ I said, ‘the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>- in spite of the last five years of intense study at the College - there are ‘no provisions’ that can be prepared in advance to help us cope with the vicissitudes of life and the dramas of history, then you are like the children of Israel in the wilderness who depend on receiving manna from the Eternal One. Nothing can save us, Kafka intuits - channelling his innate spiritual understanding of the Judaic story – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">unless we are open to receive what life offers us day by day.</i> This is the daily miracle – we receive what we need to keep us going. You have already found this out during your last 5 years together at the College – you do receive what you need, and often it is from each other, from the divine spark active in each other. What a resource! What a resource you have in each other – you know this, and I know that you treasure this. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I hope what I have said hasn’t daunted you too much!<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Remember that ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it is, fortunately( es ist ja zum Glück),</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a truly immense journey’. </i>What a wonderful sense of celebration, anticipation, hopefulness this evokes. That concluding phrase, and indeed the whole parable, is one of the great religious commentaries on the story of the Jewish people. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Today – fortunately! – you are taking your places in that story, the story of a people enamoured by stories, in thrall to stories, who still have a story to tell to the world, a story to live out. May you, ordinands of 2017, live it well. You have all our very best wishes as you set out. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></i></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></i></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-1219131573009154862017-06-18T14:33:00.000+01:002017-06-18T14:33:33.214+01:00Democracy, Leadership and ‘The Book of Jeremy Corbyn’ <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As we see in this week’s Torah portion (Numbers 14) – and last week’s election -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>leadership is a fraught business. Dissatisfaction is always round the corner, particularly if the leader is seen to be<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a bit remote, as Moses was always experienced to be by the Israelites, and Mrs. May came to be regarded during her election campaign. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Maybe it’s a good job that democracy was a Greek invention and not a Judaic one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the fifth century BCE, for the first time in any society adult, male citizens of Athens – that is, about 30% of the total population – were allowed a say on who was to be the leader of the city and its surrounding territory (Attica), a model that soon spread to other cities of Greece. By this time the major texts of the Hebrew Bible had already been written, and the different kinds of leadership in the Israelite community had already become part of the people’s consciousness. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Moses is chosen by God, so the texts say, and so too are the leaders of the next generation, Joshua and Caleb with their positive message about the possibility of settling in Canaan: ‘Yes we can’ is their Obama-esque message, which was music to God’s ears, if not the people’s (Numbers 14: 6-9).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And once the Israelites are in the land of Canaan, leadership is passed to judges, and from judges to kings – but there is not a hint of a democratic ethos in any of it. The people never get a say in choosing leaders. Even the other sources of leadership - the priests for cultic leadership and the prophets for moral and spiritual leadership - are, on the one hand, a kind of family business, inherited within the tribe of Levi and, as regards the prophets, that’s a kind of anti-leadership, a solitary, outsider role holding close to the ethical vision of the tribe. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Prophets are self-appointed, divinely-appointed - the texts offer two ways of thinking about it - but they certainly aren’t chosen by popular acclaim. On the contrary – the prophets had the same status in the eyes of the majority as do candidates from, say, the Monster Raving Looney Party. The prophets were eccentrics – as you have to be, or at least as you will be seen to be,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>if you aren’t interested in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">realpolitik </i>but set out an uncompromising moral vision as the heart and content of your message. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">So we can thank the Greeks for the blessings of democracy, not the Jews. And as we know, </span><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">“<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Democracy</span> is <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">the worst form of government</span>, except for all the others”, as Churchill once said. </span></span></span><span style="display: none; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-hide: all;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And we thank the Greeks too for introducing us to those two other concepts which have been around these last 10 days or so, and are still around – ‘hubris’ and ‘chaos’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To the Greeks, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">hubris</span></i> referred to self-confidence, pride and ambition so great that they offend the gods and lead to one's downfall. It was a character flaw often seen in the heroes of classical Greek tragedy – Oedipus, Achilles for example – and we are in the midst of witnessing hubris at work again, though on this occasion it wasn’t the gods who were offended by Theresa May but the people. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And as for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chaos</i>– the word means chasm or void in Greek – it has come to mean complete disorder: so<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>we don’t have to look too far to see how chaos, along with hubris, are dominating our day-to-day politics at the moment. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mrs. May might be a vicar’s daughter, but she has no hotline to the divine. She’s living out a Greek-style tragedy not a Judaic one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Tragedy in the Hebrew Bible has a different shape, as we see in this week’s narrative, which<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>offers us an extraordinary portrait of leadership. Moses might not have been the people’s choice – on the contrary they have distrusted him from the very beginning and in this sedrah we heard the rebellion against him in full cry: “And the people said to each other: ‘Let’s get ourselves another leader, and let’s get back to Egypt’” (14:4) – but Moses acts with humility in the face of this, along with Aaron, and he shows an amazing rhetorical giftedness for such a tongue-tied stutterer when he argues down God, who is portrayed as so angry with the people’s lack of faith in the project of entering the land that he wants to kill off the whole of the Israelite community.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Moses faces down this divine tantrum with a seductive argument aimed at God’s vanity: ‘when the other nations get to hear that you have destroyed the people of Israel, they are going to say you were too weak to get them to the promised land, and you wouldn’t want that would you? Remember who you are’ – that’s Moses’ message to God - ‘remember your better self,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>your better qualities: slow to anger, filled with lovingkindness, forgiving sin and transgression...’ (14: 18). ‘This is who you are’, he reminds God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And this flattery just about saves the day – Joshua and Caleb are saved with their descendents; and the youngsters are spared, for they are the future and they will inherit the land after the wanderings are over. But we can still call this whole episode a tragedy because the generation that left Egypt are condemned to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">schlep</i> around the wilderness until they are die off with their destination never reached. It’s only the next generation who are allowed to complete the journey and eventually to inherit the land. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Neither God nor Moses are the slightest bit interested in democracy. Giving the people a voice, a vote in their future – well, we had to wait another 2000 years before Jews got on board with that project. Of course we probably wouldn’t have it any other way now – but it’s a sobering thought that the Hebrew Bible, our sacred scriptures, are so deeply anti-democratic in their underlying ethos. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Of course the Hebrew Bible is profoundly interested in questions of justice and how a society should be organized well for the benefit of the oppressed and the marginalized, the strangers, the widows, the orphans, the disadvantaged. Loving your neighbour and acting with compassion and care is at the heart of the Jewish ethical vision – but it’s not a democratic vision, it’s a religious vision run more like a benign dictatorship, with God as the ultimate authority and various groups mediating God’s wishes for His people. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As the Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron realised this week - another small- scale personal tragedy - a religious vision does not necessarily sit comfortably with an egalitarian, democratic vision. I don’t think they have to conflict but it is salutary to be reminded that in the Judaeo-Christian tradition they might well do. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">These issues are all there in the scriptures and I want to share with you now a new scripture that has just been revealed. And I want to share it because I think you’ll enjoy it, in these fraught and chaotic times. We know the author of this scripture: he’s a Brit who writes for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane is his name, and he has uncovered a new text for our edification and enlightenment and entertainment and its name is ‘The Book of Jeremy Corbyn’, and this is what it tells: </span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Book of Corbyn<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And it came to pass, in the land of Britain, that the High Priestess went unto the people and said, Behold, I bring ye tidings of great joy. For on the eighth day of the sixth month there shall be<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a general election.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the people said, Not another one. And they waxed wroth against the High Priestess and said, Didst thou not sware, even unto seven times, that thou wouldst not call a snap election?<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the High Priestess said, I know, I know. But Brexit is come upon us, and I must go into battle against the tribes of France, Germany, and sundry other holiday destinations. And I must put on the armour of a strong majority in the people’s house. Therefore go ye out and vote. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And there came from the temple pollsters, who said, Surely this woman shall flourish. For her enemy is as grass; she cutteth him down. He is as straw in the wind, and he will blow away. And the trumpet of her triumph shall sound in the land. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the High Priestess said, Piece of cake. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And there came from the same country a prophet, whose name was Jeremy. His beard was as the pelt of beasts, and his raiments were not of the finest. And he cried aloud in the wilderness and said, Behold, I bring you hope. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And suddenly there was with him a host of young people. And he said unto them, Ye shall study and grow wise in all things, and I shall not ask ye for gold. And the sick shall be made well, and they also will heal freely. And he promised them all manner of goodly things. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the young people said unto him, How shall these things be rendered, seeing that thou hast no money in thy purse?<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And he spake unto them in a voice of sounding brass and said, Soak the rich. And again, Pull down the mighty from their seats. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the young people went absolutely nuts. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And they hearkened unto the word of Jeremy, and believed. For they said unto themselves, Lo, he bringeth unto us the desire of our hearts. He cometh by bicycle, with a helmet upon his head. And he eateth neither flesh nor fowl, according to the Scriptures. for man cannot live by bread alone, but hummus is quite another matter. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the High Priestess saw all these things and was sore. And she gathered unto her the chief scribes and the Pharisees and said unto them, What the hell is going on? <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And they said unto her, It is a blip, as if it were a rough place along the road. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But they said unto themselves, When the government was upon her shoulders, this woman was mighty. But now that she has gone abroad unto every corner of the land, she stumbleth. For surely it is written that ruling and campaigning are as oil and water, and there shall be no concord betwixt them. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the chief scribes wrote upon tablets, saying, Jeremy is false of tongue. He hideth wickedness in his heart. And his sums do not add up. And nobody paid attention. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the elders rose up and said to the young people, If ye choose Jeremy, he will bring distress in your toils and wailing upon your streets. Do ye not remember the nineteen-seventies? <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the young people said, The what? <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the elders spoke again, and said to the young people, Beware, for he gave succour in days of yore to the IRA. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the young people said, The what?<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the young people said, Jeremy shall bring peace unto all nations, for he hateth the engines of war that take wing across the heavens. And he showeth respect for all peoples, even unto the transgender community. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the elders said, The what?<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And it came to pass that the heathen of this land came among the people, with fire and sword, and slew many among the faithful. And great was the lamentation. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the High Priestess waxed exceeding wroth and said to the people, Fear not. For I shall bind your wounds and give ye shelter from the heathen, and shall take up sword against them. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And there came again pollsters from the temple, who said, Will the people not vote for her in this hour of need? <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And nobody paid attention. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And it came to the vote. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the elders went up to vote, and the young people. And the young people were a multitude. And in the hours of darkness there was much counting. And the young people watched by night, and the elders went to bed. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And there came in the morning news that the High Priestess had vanquished the prophet Jeremy. But the triumph of the High Priestess was as the width of a nail. And she was vexed. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the elders and the chief scribes and the Pharisees spoke among themselves, yea, even in the corners of their houses. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And there was great rejoicing amidst the multitude of the young. And they took strong wine, and did feast among themselves. And there were twelve baskets left over. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And of the pollsters there was no sign.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the people saw Jeremy and said, Surely this man has won? Doth he not skip in gladness like<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a young hart upon the hills? <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And there was great murmuring among the elders. And they said unto themselves, Weep not. For the High Priestess doth but prepare the way. Cometh there not one who is greater than she? <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And they said, Behold, for the hour of the redeemer is upon us. And his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Prince of Peace. And they cried in one voice, Boris. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the people gave tongue, and made supplication unto the Lord, saying, Lord, let our cry come unto thee.. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the Lord thought the whole thing was absolutely hilarious. <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And then the people said, Lord, what shall we do regarding Brexit? For henceforth the High Priestess shall be as weak as a newborn lamb. How shall we hope for continued access to the single market?<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And the Lord said, The what? <o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[ Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 9<sup>th</sup> June 2017]<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Which is just about where we are now. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And here endeth the lesson. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, June 17<sup>th</sup>, 2017]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-61601536855705804992017-05-07T20:01:00.000+01:002017-05-07T20:01:18.399+01:00Child-Sacrifice Today<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be a guest at a synagogue service when we read a text similar to the one we read this weekend. The Book of Leviticus is full of such texts – about High Priests and purification rituals and sacrifices of bulls and goats and the sprinkling of blood on altars.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We ‘insiders’ just take these texts for granted. We think: this is where we have reached in our annual cycle of reading. We don’t have&nbsp; a choice. These are our sacred texts, they have been read or chanted word for word, unchanged, week by week, for two millennia. They are central to what’s held the Jewish people together for all this time.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But if you are an outsider - if you aren’t Jewish, or if you are Jewish but an infrequent visitor to services - you come to the synagogue and hear about all these arcane and sometimes frankly repellent cultic practices that Jews don’t do anymore and haven’t done for 2000 years, because we don’t have a Temple any more (thank God, one might say). We’ve moved on into a completely different way of expressing our religious and spiritual identity. The synagogue service is part of that. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And – apart from a small fanatical minority – the vast majority of Jews never want to have anything ever again to do with relating to God, to the divine, in that archaic fashion. And yet we still read these texts, devotedly, and study them and delve into them and repeat them and teach them to our youngsters - as if they contain hidden depths of meaning and significance. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So if you come in from the outside you might well think: what a weird people this is, the Jewish people, the so-called ‘people of the Book’, immersed in these ancient stories and texts and rituals, that seem to bear no relationship to everyday life, to modern life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Take just the three verses that begin chapter 20 of Leviticus, with their repeated refrain “Don’t give up your offspring to Molech”&nbsp; -&nbsp; Molech was one of the local Canaanite gods at the time these texts were composed, when child sacrifice was still prevalent.&nbsp; &nbsp;“Don’t give up your offspring to Molech”&nbsp; means ‘don’t sacrifice <i>your</i> children’ - that’s what the other tribes do, the other people in the region; but for you, the Israelite community, it’s a crime condemned in the strongest possible terms. It deserves a death penalty in its own right, the Torah says. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And we read it and think: child-sacrifice?&nbsp; That’s nothing to do with us. Deliberately killing children, offering them to the gods - it’s barbaric. Yes, it might have been done far off in the past, in so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, but what’s the point of still repeating it now, in our sacred scriptures? Maybe it has historical value to be reminded how far we have come as a culture, but - like sacrificing goats and bullocks as a way of connecting with holiness &nbsp;- surely it’s part of a whole way of thinking that has disappeared? Surely we don’t need to be reminded when we come to the synagogue that we shouldn’t sacrifice our children to an idol, or an ideology. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Any yet. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Here are three examples of child sacrifice that are still being practiced. (And I could offer a dozen more). They are taken from one newspaper on a single day from the first week in April this year. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">First example – far away, but brought into our homes through the newspapers and television and carried around in our pockets on our screens: rows of lifeless children, some still foaming at the mouth, in a hospital, targeted, bombed, in Syria last month. They’d been taken there directly from the chemical strike in Idlib province. That second wave of bombing, of the hospital to which the victims had been taken, was a deliberate act of child-sacrifice after the first toxic strike. Back in September in besieged Aleppo the two largest hospitals were deliberately targeted : 96 children died - sacrificed.&nbsp; “You cannot imagine what we see every day: children who are coming to us as body parts. We collect the body parts and wrap them in shrouds and bury them,” said one of the nurses at one of the affected hospitals, who was there during the bombings. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Two and&nbsp; a half thousand years ago the compilers of the Torah saw the crime and judged the crime worthy of the severest punishment. “Do not sacrifice your own offspring”. This text isn’t past – it’s not from a bygone age. It’s a text speaking to today. And who knows for how long into our collective futures? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Second example, different kind. Not literal child-sacrifice but symbolic sacrifice of our offspring. Nearer to home. On our doorsteps. A joint investigation by Greenpeace and the Guardian newspaper last month revealed that hundreds of thousands of children at schools and nurseries across England and Wales are being exposed to illegal levels of air pollution from diesel vehicles. Not just in London but in towns and cities across the UK. Prolonged exposure to the nitrogen dioxide in traffic fumes reduces lung growth in children and youngsters, produces long-term ill-health and can cause premature death.&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What does this mean? It suggests that the cars we drive kill our children. This isn’t about accidents, it’s about air pollution. Who is responsible for this? Are we responsible for this? We don’t want to think that the cars we drive, the cars we choose to buy, are resulting in child-sacrifice. Yet this seemingly archaic text, the Torah, prompts these uncomfortable, inconvenient, in-your-face questions. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Final example. Another difficult one, overtly political this time. The Torah isn’t interested in party politics but it is interested in justice, and injustice, and questions of morality about how a society functions. So, third example of child-sacrifice, symbolic sacrifice: the benefits cuts that came into force last month in the UK will push a quarter of a million more children into poverty. Remove tax credit and a child doesn’t get breakfast. All the children’s charities in the UK will tell you the same thing: the basics of keeping our children safe, healthy and developing are increasingly under threat. &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">London already has the highest child poverty rate in the country. It’s not only that the freeze in benefits rates and cuts to child tax credits has&nbsp; these consequences but when central government cuts the money local councils can put into child social care there are significant knock-on effects in relation to child mental health problems, nutrition and child exploitation.&nbsp; “Do not sacrifice your children to Molech” &nbsp;– to a god, an idol, an ideology.&nbsp; It’s painful to know that children are the hidden sacrifice of a system we’ve voted for: austerity. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But the sad reality is that if you worship at the shrine of nationalism; or unfettered economic neoliberalism; or austerity, &nbsp;then the victims begin to pile up. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It is the task of religion - certainly of Judaism - to speak truth to power. As the prophets of Israel knew, such truths are often unwelcome. These ancient texts still have the power to disturb us, to disrupt our complacency, to challenge us to question ourselves about the choices we make. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Why else do we read them, year in year out, why else do we pass on their wisdom to the next generation? Jews are – in spite of everything we have suffered and experienced – almost perversely attached to remaining eternal optimists. We believe that things can change, things can improve: we stubbornly insist that if we listen in to the divine spirit which infuses these texts of our tradition, listen in and act upon the values they espouse, we can create the kind of society, the kind of world, we would like to live in. And pass on to our children. This is the promise encoded in our scriptures. It’s hard to believe sometimes, and I suppose it’s easy to ignore. But over the generations we have learnt that we ignore it at our peril. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We still insist that – whatever our own doubts, and whatever opposition we find both inside and outside the Jewish community – that Jewish life depends on, is rooted in, a continual wrestling with the texts of our tradition, however bizarre they might seem, and a continual attempt to live out, be true to,&nbsp; the inner spiritual and moral values they espouse. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">[<b>an abbreviated version of a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May 6th, 2017]</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-25080191739526601632017-04-16T10:50:00.000+01:002017-04-16T10:50:11.861+01:00“Are We the Messiah?” – a Reflection on Isaiah 11, and Other Related Matters<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">How do we retain our sense of hopefulness when so much of what we see around us seems frightening or bleak? One of the texts we read during the Passover/</span><i style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Pesach</i><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"> period is from the prophet Isaiah. I want to unpack its imagery and see whether it has anything to say to us in our current predicaments.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The chapter starts with<b> </b>an image of new growth emerging:<b> ‘A shoot shall grow out of the stump of Jesse, a twig shall sprout from his stock’</b> (11:1). <b>‘The stump of Jesse’</b> is an image of kingship – King David and his heirs were from the family of Jesse – so the poet Isaiah is talking about a renewal of hope in a wise leader, an inspired leader&nbsp; <b>-‘the spirit of the Lord shall alight upon him’ </b>(verse 2).<b> <o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And the picture is developed into a portrait of an idealised figure, leading the community, a messianic figure filled with ‘<b>a spirit of wisdom and insight’</b>, the text says, ‘<b>counsel and valour’</b>, combining a ‘<b>spirit of devotion and reverence’</b> for God with perhaps the most important attribute of all, a passion for ‘<b>justice’</b>(verses 2-4). &nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">He won’t judge just by ‘<b>what his eyes behold’</b>; he won’t make decisions just by ‘<b>what his ears perceive</b>’ (verse 3) – in other words this is leadership based not on a Trump-like immediacy (what’s&nbsp; in front of his eyes on the television,&nbsp; or what he’s told by someone else),&nbsp; but through his capacity to see beyond the superficial and the immediate and act with justice for the poor and the lowly, the have-nots. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Justice shall be the girdle of his loins’</span></b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> (verse 5) – a fine image, an image of potency:&nbsp; true potency is a passion for justice, says Isaiah. And that applies to everyone, not just leaders. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Why do we read this text on Passover? There’s another prophetic text we also use at this season, from the book of Ezekiel: the famous image of the valley of the dry bones that come back to life (chapter 37); it’s a symbol of national renewal that was composed during the exile in Babylon. The prophet is offering hope to his people in dark times.&nbsp; He imagines&nbsp; the people of Israel revived, regenerated, with a new spirit – there will be&nbsp; a second exodus, promises Ezekiel. And that’s what happened.&nbsp; The exile ended. People went back to the land, rebuilt the Temple.&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But centuries later, when it came to the period of the rabbis, they were once more living in a time of exile and diaspora, after the destruction of the second Temple. And they are the ones who decreed that at this festival we should read Ezekiel, the prophet who offered hope when things looked bleak. There’s always a need for sources of hope and inspiration in dark times. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The Isaiah text is also about hope for the future.&nbsp; We have the picture of the&nbsp; wise leader who will emerge and lead the people with justice and insight. And then the text goes on to develop a series of images that have become famous, understandably: the images move from those of an idealised leader to those that describe an idealised <i>time</i> in the future. The imagery draws on the animal kingdom, and it pictures natural predators and their prey brought together – but without harm being done: it’s an imagined time when <b>‘the wolf shall dwell with the lamb’, ‘the leopard lie down with the kid’, ‘the calf and the young lion shall feed together...and a little child shall lead them’ </b>(verse 6).<b> <o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And the poet Isaiah finds multiple images to talk about a future world in which aggression won’t disappear - but it won’t be destructive: <b>the cow and the bear shall graze together, the lion like the ox will eat straw, babies and young children will be able to play in the vicinity of vipers and adders</b>, <b>‘for they shall not hurt and destroy in all my holy mountain’ </b>(verses 7-9). But who is ‘they’? When Isaiah says ‘they’ he doesn’t just mean that the animal kingdom won’t hurt or destroy, but the human world, people, will no longer hurt or destroy, will no longer allow their innate aggression to win out over their innocence and their vulnerability. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This imagery has entered the human imagination in the Western world, through Judaism then Christianity. Isaiah’s vision became a picture of messianic hopefulness, a portrait of a wished-for time – far off in the future – when <b>‘the earth will be full of the knowledge of God as waters cover the sea’</b>(verse 9). It’s a utopian vision – a world of harmony, understanding, peace, justice, a world where people don’t act out their animal natures, their aggression, their hostility to others who aren’t like them, their wish to make victims of those who are different, their urge to tear others limb from limb. A world&nbsp; where the natural playfulness of children, the innocence of the baby, the vulnerability of the infant will be present and allowed to have space in adult life – playfulness, simplicity of feeling, vulnerability are qualities in all of us, not just in children and infants. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Isaiah’s utopian vision offers a portrait of a world where these qualities can be present in us, rather than suppressed out of fear - expressed openly&nbsp; because we won’t have to protect ourselves, defend ourselves, from the hostility and envy of others seeking our harm. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What do we feel when we read this vision? Have we stopped believing in this vision? Have we ever believed in it? Are we now too knowing, too canny, too shrewd, too cynical, too world-weary, too dulled to the cycle of ever-renewed then ever-dashed hopefulness to carry the candle for this kind of messianic hopefulness? A world of justice, and personal liberation from our fearfulness. Is this Biblical fantasy still inspiring? Or does it just make us sad as we see how far away we are from it? And always might be. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Jewish and Christian tradition has always held out this kind of hopefulness – dangling in front of us these wondrous, imaginative texts with their fantastical images. They <i>might</i> inspire us not to succumb to despair; they <i>might</i> help us renew our confidence that things can only get better, that things will turn out for the best, in the end, in the long run, in the very long run; these texts <i>might</i> continually provoke us to keep on believing that human nature is capable of change, that human aggression won’t continue to ‘hurt and destroy’. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But if they do provoke us into keeping our hope alive it means we have to go beyond what ‘our eyes perceive and our ears behold’. Because what our eyes perceive and our ears behold&nbsp; is that <i>we are a destructive species</i>. Aggression is soldered to the human soul&nbsp; and it always accompanies our heart’s finer qualities, our extraordinary creativity and goodness and capacity for transforming our world for the better. This text is a suitable one for Passover/<i>Pesach</i> , because this is the festival when we celebrate the possibility that we can be <i>freed from living under the oppressive weigh of tyranny</i>. The tyranny of human aggression – and we are both the victims of aggression and the perpetrators of aggression – is something we have to free ourselves from over and over again. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">We know how hard it is to change our aggression into love, and how hard it is for societies to stop producing victims (economic, social, political).As the years go on do we not secretly fear that in the long arc of human history, aggression and destructiveness might win out over human creativity and kindness? Can we retain our utopian hopefulness – or do we fear being crushed by our dystopian fears and nightmares? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">You see, we can’t escape the wolf and the leopard, the lion and the viper within us, with their natural aggression. It is an inevitable part of our humanity. Another Isaiah, our late British Jewish public intellectual, Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), was fond of quoting the philosopher&nbsp; Immanuel Kant: <i>‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made</i>.’&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Berlin was an anti-utopian. He saw how frequently utopian visions, whether they were religious or secular, so often ended up wreaking destruction in the attempt to create the messianic vision of a better, more just society. Revolutionary socialism ended up with the gulags, fascism with the concentration camps, Maoism in mass starvation in which millions died. Free-market individualism ends up with austerity, hardship and increased levels of poverty. Everywhere you look you see how utopianism&nbsp; - the wish for a transformed society – comes up against the knotted nature of the crooked timber of humanity, and crashes and burns. Isis is another example, the latest version of a very long line of visions of utopianism gone wrong.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">All those ideological groups throughout history were trying to straighten out the knots within human nature without realising that they themselves were part of the problem; indeed those who are most passionate about undoing the crookedness in society and in other people are often quite blind to their own crookedness. If you want a case study, just look at the White House. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">So how can this knowledge help us as we read Isaiah’s text brimming full of hopefulness for a world transformed,&nbsp;filled with justice,&nbsp;where hurt and destruction rule no longer?&nbsp; Maybe we need to stop reading our texts as describing an outer world. Maybe it’s more helpful to read them as texts which imaginatively address our inner worlds. How do <i>we</i> make our wolf and our lamb rest easily with each other?&nbsp; <i>our</i>urge to devour and possess co-exist with our gentleness and modesty?&nbsp; Both sides of our natures are real.&nbsp; How do we make our leopard lie with our inner kid? our biting sarcasm and capacity to hurt: how can it co-exist in harmony with our playfulness and innocence? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Maybe we need to start reading our texts on this festival of freedom as a series of psychological and spiritual exercises and adventures. Where is our inner child who can lead our inner lion – our pride or our fury, the way we pounce on things, tear a strip off others, tear into ourselves? Where is the inner child we have trapped in us, the part of us that can be wide-eyed with wonder and endless curious and endlessly inventive? Where is that part of us that believes in justice, that can promote justice? Rather than project it onto some idealised figure in the future, how about recognising that we have that potential grafted to our souls – to act with justice, to speak about justice, to bring more justice to the poor and the deprived. Let’s look into these ‘messianic’ texts as if they are mirrors: and realise that they are not only speaking to us, they are speaking about us. About our potential. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This festival where freedom is the leading motif – let’s allow it to speak to us about our freedom to be imaginative in our relationship to our tradition, to be playful, to read these stories and images in new ways. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Elijah’s chair at our <i>seder</i> is not only a symbol of the hope for the future. The cup of Elijah is not just about something delayed and distant. Elijah is brought into the <i>seder</i> to announce : the messianic is here and now, it’s present, <i>it’s in us</i>. It’s not out there, it’s in here, in our hearts and mouths to do it and speak it. Each of us has an element of the Messiah within us: our job is to nurture it, develop it, express it, live it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Passover/<i>Pesach</i> encourages us to free up the Messiah within us, to let it out, release it. Be kind, be generous, be compassionate, be just – this is how you express your inner Messiah. It’s everyday stuff, small scale stuff - but it’s huge. It’s our humble contribution to Isaiah’s lofty vision. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%;">[Based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, April 15<sup>th</sup>, 2017]<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-42337553676986202962017-01-26T17:01:00.000+00:002017-01-26T17:01:15.189+00:00Some Thoughts on Responsibility in the Age of Trump<div class="MsoNormal">Sometimes it is best to keep quiet. At least for a while. it gives one time to think.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In a period of history such as the one we are living through now, when the pressure is on to respond to political events with the immediacy of one’s feelings, it takes an effort of will - or perhaps it is a spiritual discipline – to stay silent. This should not be confused with quietism, or abdication&nbsp; of responsibility. But what exactly are we responsible for? &nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I can’t subscribe to the British playwright Edward Bond’s Dostoevskian sentiment: “you are responsible not just for your life, or for what happens on your doorstep, but for the universe. You have an extreme moral responsibility”. This seems more akin to an omnipotent fantasy than a guide to responsible moral living. </div><div class="MsoNormal">Yet the question of responsibility is real. What is my responsibility – our responsibility – in the era of Trump, in the era of Brexit, in the era of populist nationalism, in the post-truth era of ‘alternative facts’ (i.e. lies)? These questions have been pressing in on me over these last months. And keeping silent – a time to reflect – is all I have been able to manage. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet I can also hear that Edward Bond is right when he says, reflecting on humanity’s consistent and insistent capacity for inhumanity, “problems grow unseen, inch by inch, until it is too late to go back and what was unthinkable becomes inevitable. The impossible always occurs in history”. Indeed. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This week Trump announced details of his long-threatened intention to build his wall between the US and Mexico. Really? The border is almost 2000 miles long. That’s a lot of advertising space that’s going to become available for his businesses. (Spoiler alert: that was an alternative fact). But – if Trump’s Wall is built – it will put the&nbsp; Berlin Wall, Hadrian’s Wall, the West Bank wall into perspective. America first! </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Admittedly the Great Wall of China can’t be surpassed (13,000 miles) but Trump is an emotionally- regressed ignoramus and will be claiming his wall is the longest, the best, in the history of the world. It becomes relatively easy to predict the childlike thinking of Trump: which young boy hasn’t chanted, in narcissistic delight, while standing on a pile of stones, “I’m the king of the castle - and you’re a dirty rascal”?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Even though the tides of history have always swept away all such walls, and the need for them – Israel’s is still too young to be undermined by history – Trump’s wall will serve as a monument to his concrete thinking and (in Melanie Klein’s terminology) his paranoid-schizoid thinking. We all try to build walls – ‘defences’ – against what we find disturbing, uncomfortable, unpalatable, unacceptable, invasive of our fragile sense of well-being. Whatever thoughts enter our minds unbidden&nbsp; and unwanted – darker, aggressive, disruptive, greedy, lustful or hateful thoughts – need a wall to keep them out. Often these thoughts get projected onto the ‘other’ – and then we feel we have to be protected from those disowned impulses which we now believe are threatening us. Most of us only have the power to build our walls internally, unconsciously, in fantasy. But Trump can enact it. Much good will it do him. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To whom can we turn in dark times? This is what I have been reflecting on in this recent period of quiet. I have no certain answers, because I distrust the impulse in me towards certainty as a response to the certainty articulated by those whose views I abhor. I am going to try to stay true to what I know and what I value. For example, the stance described by the poet &nbsp;John Keats as ‘Negative Capability’: when a person “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is clearly a time when we need ‘fact and reason’ in our repertoire of responses. And need to know how and when to use it. But Keats is on to something vital. We need also to be ‘<i>capable</i>’ of holding within ourselves all the uncertainties engendered by the new world order. So that’s how I’m beginning to see my task: am I <i>capable</i> of resisting the retreat into split thinking, into horrified condemnation, into a mirror image of Trump’s regressed thinking? I am trying. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">And trying too to look to the poets and novelists and dramatists of the past, and the present, who are able to speak about the infinite complexity of our lives, our potential and our limitations. Poets whose work confirms Shelley's famous claim (in 1821) that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Sometimes it is the creative artists in our midst who have the surest finger on the pulse of the times - and sometimes a moment of prescient insight into what will unfold in the future, for good or ill. David Mamet, for example, in his 2008 play November, set in the Oval Office, created a ruthless, immoral president, Charles Smith, and penned this piece of dialogue between the President and his adviser Archer: <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Archer: (checking his notes) </i>We can’t build the fence to keep out the illegal immigrants<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Charles: </i>Why not?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i>Archer:</i> You need the illegal immigrants to build the fence. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Jews like Mamet are well-versed in using humour to see us through dark times. It is not the only response we need. But it is a vital strand in the fabric of resistance and action and reflective thinking that I sense we will have to call up in ourselves in these next few years.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-76532987544050386732016-12-31T20:01:00.000+00:002016-12-31T20:01:18.999+00:00 <br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">Rabbi Lionel Blue <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">z”l</i></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">What I remember most vividly was the cauliflower soup. It was the first time I’d been on a Retreat with my fellow rabbinic students from Leo Baeck College. So I’m going back 40 years or so. It was a cold, November day, in a rather austere, ramshackle Christian priory in Sussex that Rabbi Lionel Blue had taken us to. That first morning we practised sitting in silence – such a hard thing for Jews to do. Lionel suggested half an hour to start with – to be quiet, see where our minds went and whether, beyond the chatter in our heads, we could hear anything else.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">This was hard to do at first – it was such an alien concept, so ‘Christian’ to my provincial Jewish mind. But we trusted Lionel, or at least I did: he was one of my teachers, and a different kind of teacher from the more academically-oriented teachers I was used to at Leo Baeck College. He had something else to teach, something that came out of his own lived experience, his own struggles with faith, his own struggles with life.</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">He spoke of his God as a friend, as a conversation partner, as a voice that did not always tell him what he wanted to hear but that was available if he, Lionel, allowed himself to listen. Lionel’s God seemed to accompany him on his journey through life, provoking him, re-assuring him, comforting him, nagging him, reminding him of the things that mattered in life, giving him a perspective on what really counted, helping him understand how something that seemed to be important in the heat of the moment could turn out to be trivial in the larger scheme of things. Lionel’s God helped him discriminate – as Lionel might say - between God’s point of view which was infinite and ours, which is always limited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">Because we were trainee rabbis we were very keen to discuss the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">idea</i> of God, to swap theological insights - but we weren’t very good at moving out of our heads towards our hearts. But for me Lionel’s retreats were a highlight of my time as a student rabbi because they allowed time to focus on experience and exploration and not just on thinking and knowing, or pseudo-knowing.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">It’s not that Lionel was not a thinker – on the contrary. Around that time I went to a conference where Lionel was one of the speakers and his theme was post-War European Jewish life; and I remember how he spoke for an hour without notes and gave a brilliant survey of how Jewish life was being lived in Germany and Holland and France and Italy and the UK. It was a stunning <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tour de force</i>, a vivid, detailed portrait - and he concluded with one thing which has stuck in my mind ever since.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">That what the experience of the War had taught Jews - should have taught Jews - wherever they lived in Europe, was not to put their trust in political parties or economic theories: that ‘boom and bust’ was always going to be the pattern of history – and that if Jews trusted in material things, hoping they would last, hoping that they could gain security from what was in the end transient, they would always come unstuck, or <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>come to grief. That to be Jewish meant trusting in what you couldn’t see, couldn’t count, couldn’t measure, couldn’t hold in your hands – it meant trusting in the spirit. This was what it meant to live in a tradition with a God you couldn’t see. Judaism was an education in trusting the intangible.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">Lionel had a first-class mind – you might have forgotten that if you just heard his often whimsical, folksy contributions to <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>BBC radio’s ‘Thought for Today’. He just recognised that he couldn’t rely on the mind, the intellect, alone to get him through life. He was after the inner experience contained within all those clever theological words that we LBC students were bandying about that chilly autumn day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">But back to the cauliflower soup. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Lionel had disappeared at some stage during the afternoon and by supper time - with an economy of effort and more than a <span class="st1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">soupçon</span></i></span> of unrehearsed love – he produced a giant tureen of the most heart-warming, rich, smooth, creamy, flavoursome cauliflower soup that you could imagine. His soup spoke more eloquently of the spirit than all our high-flown rabbinic waffling. This was food for - and from - the soul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It tasted, so to speak, of heaven.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">For Lionel, the preparing and cooking and eating and sharing of food was a primary medium for spiritual self-expressiveness. He built a lot of his Jewish thinking around the kitchen. He taught how the cupboards and cabinets and drawers of the Jewish home contained the artefacts of Jewish spirituality: the candlesticks and bread covers and wine cups for Shabbat, lying neglected during the week, were capable of transforming secular time into holy living when the hour was right.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">In his first book – which was arguably his best (To Heaven With Scribes and Pharisees, 1975) – he’d written how: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘in the cupboards [of the Jewish home] holy and secular meet and jostle, there is no strain, for all things can be transformed if they are turned to God. Cocktail cabinets and the kitchen drawer are the sacristy for the liturgy of the home’</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">Indeed for Lionel any gathering of convivial souls, where food was honoured, was a form of secular transubstantiation: God made present through the bonds of family, friends, guests, brought together to celebrate the joys of sharing food, hospitality, intimacy and laughter.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">Like many people who have pockets of pain tucked away, Lionel used laughter a lot in his teaching. Humour was an essential ingredient in his repertoire – but when he wanted to he could move from laughter and a lightness of being to seriousness and thoughtfulness in the twinkling of an eye.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">But he never pontificated. When I heard him talk over the years I almost never heard him addressing the large themes that rabbis often find themselves speaking about – politics, the environment, social justice, Israel, communal Jewish politics, world events. He usually focused on the human, the local, the small scale, the personal, on individual acts of kindness and generosity he’d witnessed, on people’s relationship to animals, to their actual neighbours, to the everyday joys and sadnesses of family life.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">He spoke about conversations with people he’d actually met: for many years when I lived in Finchley I’d see Lionel in the High Street, stopping or getting stopped every few yards, talking to someone <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>- they might be well-dressed or a vagrant, it never seemed to make a difference, he treated them the same - and sometimes people were talking to him and he was listening, and sometimes he was talking to them, but he had time for all of them, old and young, rich and poor, he never seemed hurried. It never seemed to me as I watched him – and I did watch him – as if he had his own life to live. It was as if he saw these<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>random meetings and conversations as his life – his own life was not separate from this – these were the encounters, the meetings, that mattered, that fed his own life, that were his life.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">The stuff that happened to him every day was the religious material of his life: this is what he learnt from; and this is what he taught about. That a random, overheard remark going down the Finchley High Road could change your life – it was like an angel speaking in your ear. No, not ‘like’ an angel, it was an angel. A message and messenger from the Divine. This was a piety both simple and profound.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">Although he ended up paradoxically as head of the Reform Beth Din, Lionel didn’t have much time for the Jewish religious establishment – ‘too much role playing’, he’d say - and he was a religious pragmatist: he thought that the only parts of religious tradition worth saving were the parts that you found worked for you - the rituals or prayers that spoke to you, or that you could use in such a way that God spoke to you through them.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">The rest of it, if it was all jumbo-jumbo to you – well, you should just ditch it and find something else that worked. That’s what I mean by a pragmatist. Find what works and use it – and if what works for you is a Quaker meeting or a Buddhist meditation technique, that’s fine: just use it. Be a magpie, take what you need. That’s part of what made him a great religious ecumenical figure. He could see the value in other religious traditions and didn’t feel the need to claim that his own was better, or more truthful.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">So, to come back to food for a moment, Lionel taught me how -- like the Mass or the Eucharist ceremony, the Hindu food offering to the gods, the Sikh <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kara prashad</i> holy sweet, the Muslim <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shir kurma</i> dessert at the end of Ramadan, and the Buddhists in Japan celebrating with red beans and rice -- Jewish food was also a route to holiness. And that anyone, sophisticated or unlearned, could make it part of their journey to holy living.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">So Lionel was a religious pragmatist. But he was also a sentimentalist, after a fashion. He wasn’t a nostalgist for some lost world of Jewish innocence or idealised shtetl life – growing up in the harshness and hard-headedness of the East End of London meant that he was immune to any <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>idealisation about the Jewish past. But he was a sentimentalist in that he believed – or wanted to believe, I could never quite work out <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>which – in simple truths about the innate goodness of the human heart. And about how God was his best friend. And a sentimentalist in his belief that a good story could take you a very long way in helping people overcome their fears and problems. And this was in spite of years and years he spent in therapy coming to terms with his own demons.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">And he did become a great storyteller, a great myth-maker, often about his own life. He once admitted to me that he was a mythographer: he wove personal anecdotes into religious material that he could then retail and re-tell. He’d found there was always a ready audience for this kind of storytelling. He told some stories about his formative experiences so many times that they were honed to perfection, but would still change from book to book, from interview to interview, tweaked to bring the best out of them for each occasion.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">This isn’t a criticism – I say it in admiration, and awe, and envy, for the gift he had of being the raconteur of his own life. He was a craftsman weaving a rich tapestry out of the fabric of his eventful and idiosyncratic life.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">His pragmatism and sentimentalism were often there at the same time. On that first retreat I remember him saying apropos the soup: ‘Theologies alter and beliefs may die, but smells always remain in memory’. And there you have it – the essential religious understanding and the naked appeal to subjective feeling in one sentence. Maybe it was a quote from one of his books, or maybe it ended up in one of his books – but it doesn’t matter. He had a gift for turning experience into memorable language - you can almost always tell in our Reform liturgy the prayers that Lionel wrote. They have stood, and will stand, the test of time because they have a humanity to them, a truthfulness of feeling, that speaks to the heart and not to the head. Words mattered to him – almost as much as food.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">He knew that his legacy would not only be in the memories people would have of him but the words he’d leave behind. A few years ago I interviewed him for a celebratory volume for his co-liturgist Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, about their work together in Europe in the 1960s and 70s, when the trauma of the Shoah was still heavy on the ground, and it became necessary to build a new European Jewish consciousness out of the ashes of destruction. Lionel wanted to see the text of the interview before it was published, to read it and edit it, to shape it as he wanted the story to be remembered - which of course I let him do, even though by that time, because of his Parkinson’s, he could hardly hold in his hand a pen to do the editing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Words mattered. How you told the story mattered. The truth was in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">how</i> it was told not just in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what</i> was told.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">What would Lionel make, I wonder, of the mess we are in now in Europe, as one <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">annus horribilis</i> ends, and another year breaks onto the shoreline in front of us? He’d probably have a joke to cheer us up, or at least a good story. Maybe the story I first heard him tell during that Retreat, that speaks of where we are and how we need to go about facing our futures. He called it Heaven and Hell.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">It’s the story about a rabbi who wanted to see both heaven and hell. He fell asleep and dreamt that he was standing in front of a door, that opened into a room; and the room was prepared for a feast. A table was set and at its centre lay a great dish of delicious hot food. Guests sat around the table with long spoons in their hands, but they were crying out with hunger and wailing in pain: the spoons were so long that, however they distorted themselves, they could not get the food into their mouths. Unable to nourish themselves, they cursed <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>God the author of their plight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And the rabbi awoke, knowing he had seen hell.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;">But he fell asleep again and dreamt that he was standing in front of a door, that opened into a room; and the room was prepared for a feast. A table was set and at its centre lay a great dish of delicious hot food. Nothing had changed and he was about to cry out in horror. Then he saw that the guests had smiles on their faces, for with the same long spoons they were reaching out across the table to feed each other. And they were giving thanks to God the author of their joy. The rabbi awoke and he too blessed God who had shown him the nature of heaven and the nature of hell. And the chasm – just a hairsbreadth wide -- that always divides them. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, 31<sup>st</sup> December 2016]<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-64878831622760318392016-11-24T17:34:00.000+00:002016-11-24T17:34:15.672+00:00The Arc of the Moral Universe – and How we Deal with Loss <span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">President Obama was fond of quoting Martin Luther King’s hope-filled maxim: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’. King himself was borrowing this - from the American Transcendentalist and Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker (1810-1860). Whatever its source – and we can hear within it an echo of traditional Judaic hopefulness – I have always had faith in this notion that over time societies on this planet are moving, can move, will move – with struggle, with regression, two steps forward, one step back – towards a more developed (i.e. more humane, more self-aware, more compassionate) relationship with each other. A faith that the pursuit of justice will lead collectively – over time - to more justice.&nbsp;</span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span><br /> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Not that justice somehow arrives by itself, but that it is made out of all the moral, social, political actions of countless individuals, generation by generation. In spite of knowing that the 20<sup>th</sup> century saw something approaching 200,000,000 government-determined deaths in various wars, genocides, victimizations, internal oppressions and other conflicts, I never gave up on the faith, belief, hope that ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’. But I am now beginning to think of this hope as a necessary illusion – a deep wish, rather than a clear-eyed appreciation of the destructiveness that always lurks in the human heart. A destructiveness with the toxic potential to overwhelm human creativity, compassion and millennia-old wishes for an end to injustice.&nbsp;</span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It feels as if in recent months my self-delusion has begun to get ruthlessly exposed. After Brexit, and now Trump, and as I see the waves of anti-foreigner, populist aggression swirling through the UK and the rest of Europe, I am beginning to wonder at my own naivety. We seem to be spiralling back towards periods in history when the darker side of human nature expressed itself more forcefully then the generous, creative side. Has it always been this way, and I just didn’t want to see it? We will have to keep our eyes – and hearts – open in these next few years.&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">These thoughts have led me to think - not for the first time of course, but this time round with an added seriousness - about loss. How do we manage loss in everyday life? Loss of a job, loss of a loved one or friend, loss of money or something we value, loss of a relationship, loss of a pet, loss of an opportunity, loss of one’s looks, loss of an election, loss of hope? Losses are all around us. They are part of the fabric of life. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All losses challenge us emotionally. How do we respond? Do we become angry or bitter? despairing? sad? do we feel resigned, or accepting? Do we express these feelings - or cover them up? Do we try and compensate for the loss, or do we spend time mourning what has now gone? These are the challenges that life brings us, for loss is a shared and universal human experience. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">And all losses involve some loss of hope</span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">: hope for continuity, hope for love, hope for security, hope for a future brighter than the past. For hope is inbuilt into the human psyche – but the reality of loss can attack that hopefulness like<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a kick in the stomach, like a thief in the night. Loss can make us suddenly feel very vulnerable. We realise that our fantasies of being in control, of controlling our lives, are just that – fantasies, wishes. Losses, of whatever kind, are painful and unwelcome reminders of how little control we have of our own lives and what might happen to us. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As with all the emotional realities that we face as human beings, the Hebrew Bible offers its own insights and perspectives. This week’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sedrah</i> – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chayai Sara</i> (Genesis 23 - 25:18) – begins with loss: the death of the matriarch Sara at the legendary age of 127. This is narrated matter-of-factly: ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sara died in Kiryat Arba – that is Hebron – in the land of Canaan</i>’ (23:2). No other details are given. And this is always an opportunity for later commentators to add their own colour to the monochrome text.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Some linked Sara’s death to the Torah text that immediately precedes it: the trauma of Isaac’s near-sacrifice by his father Abraham. So she dies of shock at hearing the news – or of heartbreak. One <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">midrash</i> has her dying of shock on receiving a false report that Abraham had killed their son at God’s command. (Compare Facebook’s <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>notorious false anti-Clinton news reports planted by Trump supporters before the election). </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">One modern commentator, Aviva Zornberg, speculates psychologically about how Sara, although she knew that Isaac had survived, could not bear to live any longer in a world as unreliable, unpredictable – and threatening – as the world she found herself in, where questions of who will live and who will die seem to hang so fragilely in the balance. A world where one is confronted with how little control we have, as I suggested above, over what might happen to us, or to those we love. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Perhaps in recent times we too have got in touch with these deeper feelings -after a terrorist attack. Our vulnerability is exposed and there is a horror not only at the deaths and the suffering, but at the randomness of who will live and who will die. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>It could be any of us. Sara’s death, in our mythological narrative following the near-murder of her son, opens us up to these disturbing, maybe unbearable, thoughts. And we recognise too that there is a long back-story to narratives about a God who commands murder. Or rather: there’s a long and bloody history of people who believe that their God commands them to kill others in the name of that God.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So Sara dies and Abraham weeps for his loss (23:2). And then he gets on with life. He negotiates for a burial plot for Sara, and having bought a plot of land from the local inhabitants he proceeds to bury her (23: 3-20) and then sets out, through the servant in charge of his household, to find a wife for Isaac, their son (chapter 24).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The long chapter that describes this search for a wife is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tour-de-force</i> of Biblical storytelling – and it ends with this poignant sentence: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘And Isaac brought her [Rebekkah] into the tent of his mother Sara and he took Rebekkah as his wife and he loved her and Isaac was comforted after his mother</i> - acharei<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>imo’ (24:67). We might expect ‘after the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">death</i> of his mother’. But no, the word ‘death’ is absent. We know this is what it means - but the narrator-artists who composed the text have chosen to suppress the word. Through the absence of this word ‘death’ in the text, the narrators provoke us into thinking about it. It is hidden in plain sight. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">By looking away from it at the last moment, what does this missing word <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>- ‘death’ - reveal? Some people – was Isaac one of them? – wish to deny the reality of death. The fantasy is that if you don’t mention something it’s as if it hasn’t happened. After all, he’d been through his own near-death experience. Was the immediate loss of his mother too much to bear after his own trauma? So is the absence of the word ‘death’ pointing to a denial of reality? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Or is it the opposite - a way of speaking about how the loss was healed? Does the comfort he had received when Sara was alive metamorphose into the new comfort he found with Rebekkah? Is the pain of the death of his fiercely protective mother erased through the love of a good woman? Does giving and receiving love heal our losses? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is no hint in the Torah of what Sara’s death meant to Isaac. But we sense from this concluding verse how present Sara was for him as he takes Rebekkah <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>into his mother’s intimate space, her tent. And through the intimacy with her – ‘and he loved her’ – he does find comfort for the loss he has suffered. More human connectedness, more closeness, more intimacy – this seems to be one way, the Torah intuits, of managing feelings of loss, dealing with the pain. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Perhaps we don’t have a good enough, rich enough, vocabulary to talk about what we do with the experience of loss. I just used the words ‘managing’ the loss, ‘dealing’ with the loss – but that is too business-like, too bureaucratic a language to evoke the powerful<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>and subtle stands of feeling that death and loss evoke in us. Some people want people around them, some people want to be left alone. We each will find what route is right for us.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">One thing I do know is that the modern jargon of talking about ‘closure’ after a death is quite unhelpful. This idea of ‘closure’ is now prevalent in the aftermath of any injustice or painful event. But it can be coercive to expect it for oneself - or to have others expect it of you. ‘Have you had closure yet?’ has become a modern mantra - but it promotes an illusion. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">‘Closure’ came into contemporary thought from American social psychology. It originates in a 1993 paper from Arie Kruglanski about people’s </span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">desire for a clear and definite answer to their life questions - and their aversion to ambiguity. Kruglanski developed what became known as the ‘Need for Closure Scale’ - but this concept of ‘closure’ was gradually transformed from something descriptive of<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> what people wished for</i>into some kind of ideal about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what they <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">should</b> have</i>. Psychological health however is about being able to manage ambiguity, not-knowing, uncertainty – without collapsing into the straightjacket of false certainties. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">What Kruglanski’s work spawned is a pseudo-solution to a universal problem. ‘Closure’ is a flawed belief that assimilating grief and losses and death into our lives is a process that can be closed, finished with. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Jewish tradition however recognises that losses are real, and lasting: they will happen to you and me, they happen to all of us, and the work of mourning can last a lifetime. Isaac didn’t have ‘closure’ about his mother’s death when he and Rebekkah married. Like Abraham his father, he got on with life. We have to learn to live with our sadness, our regrets - or sometimes with our lack of sadness, or our relief, or whatever it is that emerges in the wake of a death. Our reaction to loss and death is always going to be particular to us. We are allowed to be idiosyncratic.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Sigmund Freud once wrote a condolence letter in which he put his finger on something crucial. His own daughter Sophie had died in 1920 when she was 27, and nine years later, on what would have been her 36<sup>th</sup>birthday,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Freud wrote to a colleague, Ludwig Binswanger, whose son had just died<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>‘we will never find a substitute [after a loss]. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be, it is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.’ </i></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Freud gives us permission to keep on loving what has been lost for as long as we need to. Someone else – or something else – may come along and take the place of what has been lost. But it will be something, or someone, different. And that is how it should be. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">And I am left to ponder on what happens after one experiences the loss of hope contained in that inspirational text: </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’? There can be no substitute – but what will take its place? </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-3776229244736555672016-11-17T10:46:00.001+00:002016-11-17T10:46:19.823+00:00Truth and Lies in a 'Post-Truth' World <span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">We can feel the tectonic plates shifting. First came the challenge to Europe of the largest mass movement of people across borders since the end of World War II, a humanitarian crisis that has <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>become knotted into what right-wing press were already perceiving as the unravelling fabric of European life. Then there was Brexit and the challenge it poses to the future of the European Union’s increasingly shaky stability. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">And now there is Trump – and this much-mocked businessman, TV reality star and egoist is about to destabilise further the post-War US-European network of alliances (NATO) and trade agreements in which our lives are embedded. Or so we have been led to believe: as yet, we have no way of knowing. Will rhetoric become reality? </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;"> </span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">We can see which European politicians have been celebrating his election win – Martine le Pen, Geert Wilders, Norbert Hofer in Austria, Frauke Petry of the <span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?url=https://www.facebook.com/alternativefuerde/&amp;rct=j&amp;frm=1&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;sa=U&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj318ao4qrQAhUHWxoKHWzVB60QFggpMAQ&amp;sig2=6tplvUH0COg7vAGohRfjFg&amp;usg=AFQjCNHl4kInYFG1RNDK6hcFALC7rIg7ZA"><span style="color: windowtext; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Alternative für Deutschland. They all </span></a>hope to capitalise on the nationalistic, anti-establishment and racist populism that Trump’s victory<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>represents. Economic despair may have given him millions of votes – but it is hard to ignore his anti-immigrant polemics as being a fundamental part of his appeal. His appointment<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>of Stephen Bannon to the post of Chief of Staff – a white nationalist with a penchant for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories – is a chilling choice.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">And then there is Putin, whose laughter at Trump’s success must be filling the corridors of the Kremlin. Thirty years after the historian David Irving’s Holocaust-denying ‘post-truth’ history we have entered the world of ‘post-truth’ politics. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Both the Brexit and Trump campaigns had no hesitation in offering lies to the public. Both campaigns recognised that once you dispense with truth, you have an astonishing freedom: you can say anything you want in the furtherance of your cause. Joseph Goebbels - Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda - made a career out of this freedom. He understood - and capitalised on - a psychological insight into our human susceptibility to simplistic statements that tell us ‘how things are’ or ‘must be’: “</span><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility, because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily". </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">This is how propaganda – and advertising – works: it speaks to our unconscious desires, or our<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>unconscious wishes for clarity, for some graspable ‘truth’ in a chaotic, unstable world. Goebbels statement is often quoted in its own distorted version:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>"The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed." There is no documentary evidence that he said this, but in its simplistic form it has become what people think he said. Which is of course an unintended ironic confirmation that if something is distorted but then repeated often enough it becomes ‘true’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">This week’s Torah <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sedrah, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Va’yera</i>(Genesis 18-22), is a helpful <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>one to reflect on in the light of these questions about truth and lies. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sedrah</i>’s name is taken from the first word of the section: ‘And there appeared...’ – it alerts us to the themes that will unfold in the narrative that follows. The text will address what can appear before our eyes – and how we interpret what we see. And it will talk about what we refuse to see, the truths we can’t bear to see – and (in the story of Lot’s wife who turns back to see her city in flames) what we can’t bear not to see. It is all about sight, and insight – Biblical Hebrew does not distinguish between the two – and blindness, literal and metaphorical.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">Take the opening narrative. The text says that God – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adonai</i>, the ‘Eternal’ – appeared to Abraham as he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day (18:1). We the readers are given an omniscient overview of what is happening. But what does Abraham see? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘He lifted up his eyes and he saw, and behold there were three people there.’ </i>(18:2). Three strangers. And he greets them with generosity and hospitality. Like a Cubist portrait, the storytellers place the two perspectives side by side, or one on top of the other: the overview and then the view from the perspective of Abraham . This dual perspective opens up a radical piece of theology: you meet ‘God’ in the Other. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">Millennia before Martin Buber developed his philosophy of I-Thou, in which our relationships with others become one of the ways we encounter the divine, the Torah offers us a story about seeing in other people the image of ‘God’. Abraham sees other human beings appear before him and he treats them with an open heart and a generous spirit – this is an encounter with the Eternal, the Eternal One. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">And then we have a delightful turn of events, as the narrator gives us a picture – shockingly! – of a God made in our human image, a God who lies. How does God lie? One of these strangers tells Abraham: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘When I come back next year, your wife Sara will have had a son’</i> and Sara overhears this (18:10). And the storyteller then reminds us that both Abraham and Sara were old, and that Sara no longer was menstruating (18:11). And then: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘And Sara laughed </i>(vatizchak)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>inside herself and she said to herself: “Now that I am so old and worn out, am I to have such pleasure, with my husband being so old?”’</i> (18:12). </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-outline-level: 4;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">This is a very daring sentence from our narrator. It shows us Sara eavesdropping on the conversation between her husband and the guests, then it reveals an intimate detail from Abraham and Sara’s sex life. The more you think about it, the more remarkable it is, for the storyteller gets us the readers, the listeners, inside of Sara: the verse penetrates her , symbolically, and we find out what this news does to her inside of herself. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">It’s the first time in the Torah that we find this key word, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tzachak</i>, a word which is to echo and re-echo through the texts and the generations – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tzachak</i>, to laugh. It will of course become the name of the son, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yitzchak</i>, Isaac – ‘the one who laughs’. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">But where is the lie, God’s lie? The next verse tells us that God says to Abraham: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘ “Why did Sara laugh, saying, “Shall I really bear a child, being as old as I am?”’</i>(18:13). And there’s the lie. She says ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he</i>is too old’. But our narrator has God changing this, when he speaks to Abraham, into Sara saying ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> am too old’. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">So why does God tell this lie to Abraham?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>A midrash suggests that God did it so that Abraham wouldn’t feel offended or hurt: in other words, to protect Abraham’s feelings (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baba Metzia 87a)</i>. And so important was this principle, that the Rabbis derived a maxim, a rule of thumb, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one is allowed to lie if it will hurt someone’s feelings to tell the truth straightforwardly and honestly</i> (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ketubot</i> 16b-17a). Why? Because to hurt someone’s feelings was equated by the Rabbis with the shedding of blood. There is an extraordinary Judaic sensitivity here towards an individual and their emotional life. The other person is <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>flesh-and-blood just like you, and has feelings just as real and sensitive as your own. Protect the other’s feelings as if they were as precious as your own. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">And the Rabbis went even further than that. ‘When is lying acceptable?’ they asked. ‘Lying is also permissible’, they said, ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if it is for the sake of peace’</i> (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yevamot </i>65a). (So if your partner says: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>‘Do I look good in this?’ – the answer is ‘Yes’).&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">So on the one hand the rabbis in the Talmud stated that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Emet</i>, ‘truth’,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>is one of God’s thirteen attributes – they used the famous text of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Exodus 34:3 as a reference. And they were unequivocal about this: ‘the Seal of God is Truth’ (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shabbat</i> 55). But on the other hand in the real world they saw that there needed to be some flexibility about this. Lying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘for the sake of peace’</i> can cover a broad spectrum: from international politics to personal relationships. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">Jewish teaching does offer insight and guidance, and ways of thinking about all sorts of everyday situations - but it can’t give us an answer for a specific situation we find ourselves in. Only we are responsible for that. We have to judge and decide how to act, how to be, what to say, each time, every day, and the decision of today may not be relevant tomorrow. That’s part of the God-given burden of being human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">We live in a world where it can be hard to sort out the truth from the lies. Dizzying amounts of information, opinion, propaganda, deception, distortion, fabrication<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>swirl though our daily lives. Who has the time, the energy, to sort out the truth from the lies? And yet I think of this task, of trying to stay attuned to what is ‘true’, to be part of the spiritual task of the Jewish people. In a week when Oxford Dictionaries has announced that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">post-truth</i>is its international ‘word of the year’, our Jewish task seems to have become even harder – and even more important.</span> </span></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-78192783311974590952016-11-09T14:29:00.001+00:002016-11-09T14:29:32.797+00:00"A Plot Against America" - a Creative Response. <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So now we know. After an epic journey of lies, insults and threats, in 2017 there will be a racist, sexist demagogue in the White House. The populist violence-in-the-human-heart<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>that led to Brexit has another victory. These are sad – and fearful – times for those who value reflection, the ethics of civilised debate, and a compassionate approach to our shared problems. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size: 14pt;"></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It seems it could be time to re-read Philip Roth’s prescient novel ‘The Plot Against America’ (2004), which imagines a fascistic US government suspending civil liberties and persecuting minorities deemed to be a threat to security. It’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a book that had a predecessor in American literature, Sinclair Lewis’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>‘It Can’t Happen Here?’ (1935) about the takeover of the American government by an unstable mix of far-right and populist forces. Imaginative literature might be the most useful resource we have right now to help us deal with feelings of helplessness, anger, or fear about our shared future on this planet. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I am reminded of Salman Rushdie’s words in 1989 when he went into hiding after he became the victim of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fatwa</i> against him - and the populist violence it unleashed - following publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’: “Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope not to find absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.”</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The rabbis of old also took this stance. They called their imaginative literature ‘midrash’. In this spirit I’d like to offer,&nbsp;in relation to this week’s Torah portion, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lech l’cha</i> (Genesis 12 onwards),&nbsp;a creative midrash on the early life of Abraham. It re-works a text I've composed and offered before, but I hear the injunction <em>lech l'cha</em> (12:1)<em> - 'go for your own sake, go into yourself, go towards yourself'</em>&nbsp;- as giving permission, and encouragement, to keep on working at the things that matter, on the journey towards that impossible destination: a place of truth, a space that offers another perspective&nbsp;and antidote to a demagogue's lies, insults and threats. </span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>**<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It’s when they attack my father for what he believed in, that I grow really angry. He was a good man, Terach, a true believer in the old gods. Without his wise counsel and strength of character I would not here today, here to tell my story - even though my story, my beliefs, differ so markedly from his. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">His gods, my father’s gods, were gods that failed: they were the gods he’d come to know during his long life, learned to trust from early on, the gods of nature and of death, of the harvests and the seas, of fertility and the seasons; in Ur of the Chaldees where he was born he was ruled by the sun and the moon, and his gods were close to him: he found them living in the earth and he saw them daily in the heavens and in the patterns of the night sky, and he trusted in them, for they gave him life and they gave a meaning to death, they structured the rhythms he lived by, they were all he needed. And he took them with him on his great migration - it is described in the books (Genesis 11:31). </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">He took us all - myself, Abram; my wife Sarai; my cousin Lot – he took us away from what he’d known, and settled in Haran, on his way to Canaan, where we were always meant to go. Canaan was his Promised Land, before it became mine. But&nbsp;he died there, in Haran, and was buried with his gods around him: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>gods that the next generation<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>(or at least me, in the next generation) could see the limitations of, even though he believed they would always sustain a man and his family, in this world and the world to come. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And when the lazy, the vicious or the ignorant attack his beliefs - when they disparage him, as people do, with the immense condescension of posterity - that’s when I feel aggrieved.&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">For although I don’t believe in his gods, and their powers to determine life, he taught me the values of faith, the importance of belief, of holding on to what one feels is true in the face of scorn and derision, of cynicism and fear. He taught me that to have a vision was important - if it is rooted in something other than one's ego: to live one’s vision was life-affirming, and would give life to others. Without that vision of his he would not have left his homeland and planted himself in alien soil. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And I learnt from this courage he possessed– so that when I was called to move on, I was able to listen, to follow where I was led (Genesis 12:1-4). I learnt that gift from him, my father Terach. So when they attack him for his beliefs, they attack me. Even though what I believe is different from what he believed, when the gods were near at hand and seemed to help him every day.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">For I was called – as is every youngster, in every generation – to build on the past, to forge a new vision, informed by new situations, new realities, and not to rely, not to put my faith in, the old ways and the old gods. I was called into something new – but it took me a long time to understand what it was all about. I’m not sure I ever really understood. I’m not sure it’s understandable. All that talk of blessing and sacrifice, of ‘being a blessing’ (12:2) and being the bearer of an ‘everlasting covenant’ (17:7). What does it really mean? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I am not sure I ever understood who or what was calling me away from the old ways, calling me on into the unknown – it always came out of the blue, unexpectedly, randomly, the relentless unforeseen, like a message written into the sand beneath my feet: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>‘open your eyes, see what is there, look into yourself, and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>look up from yourself, look at the stars: they are your family written into the future, your descendents, constellations of faith...’ </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And every step of the way there was fear - fear and trembling. The fear of the unknown, the dread of what would be demanded next. And the deep dark vision of future suffering, the shadows haunting the blessing: that we would be strangers in a strange land, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">yidden</i>, not just once, but over and again through the generations, carrying that blessed/cursed covenant seared to our souls. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">People forget how painful this process was for me, how hard it was to let go of our old ways of thinking. But gradually it dawned on me - or it was forced on me, sometimes it came like a revelation, a sudden vision, a clarity of seeing, of insight – that all those old gods, different gods for different parts of life, separate gods for separate parts of reality (<em>El</em> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baal</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mot</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shaddai</i> ), I realised that they just couldn’t all be split up, the gods – the e<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lohim</i> -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>they couldn’t all have an independent life of their own, but they had to be connected, they had to belong together, they had to One, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Echad</i>. The divine couldn’t exist sometimes here and sometimes there, but the divine was in everything - it really was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Echad, </i>One - and that meant it embraced me as well. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This is why I lived in fear, trembling before the mystery of Being. The mystery that past and present and future is just our way of seeing, our way of being, but in essence all is One, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ethad</i>. Who could live with this? It demands too much. And yet I found myself bound into a relationship with the One, the Eternal One, bound into a covenant with a new way of seeing, a new way of believing, a new way of being alive where my being resonated with the Being of the universe. Who wouldn’t be frightened of seeing the world this way?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And it changed me, this new way of seeing. I started off as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avram ben Terach</i> - Avram, son of Terach. And I became <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avram ha-Ivri</i>, Avram the ‘one who crossed over’ – for I did cross a border, not just a geographical one but a border of belief. I crossed over from the old gods of my father to a new intuition about divinity: that everything was connected, everything was One. I became <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avram ha-Ivri</i>, whom you know as ‘Avram the Hebrew’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And from there to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Avraham</i>, the ‘founder of faith’, the founder of faiths – who could have imagined?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It was a long journey for a boy born in Haran to a father who’d put his faith in the old <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">elohim</i> in all their dazzling multiplicity, a long journey to a new way of thinking about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Elohim</i> (same name, different way of seeing what it meant), a long journey to a new kind of faith, a faith not just rooted in nature but rooted in story, in history, filled with surprises, challenges, obligations, duties, a faith austere and joyful, fraught with uncertainty, shadowed by doubts, a faith my descendents began to think of as belonging to me - though it isn’t mine, it belongs to all of us. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And this journey continues, the journey of faith of <em>Avraham Avinu</em>– ‘our father Abraham’ . So if you attack my faith, or my faithful ones (who may not even believe that I ever existed) - if you attack them, then you attack me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I am Avram, son of Terach. Proud child of a father in whom I still have pride. As it should be. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-77230940709148687202016-11-06T13:19:00.000+00:002016-11-06T13:19:16.844+00:00On Rainbows and Other Moments of Wonder <span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What do you think when you see a rainbow? What do you feel? Do you say to yourself: ‘Oh, look at that fine example of the refraction and dispersal of light in water droplets?’. You may know that this is what you are seeing, but I doubt that you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">experience</i> a rainbow in that way. I’ve noticed that people often stop what they are doing and look, gaze at it for a while. (Nowadays they also seem to instantly reach for their phones to take a picture if it). We stop and look at this natural phenomenon <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as if has some meaning</i>. As if it is more than just an optical illusion (which it is) or a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>temporary aesthetic experience of a beautiful aspect of the natural world. What’s going on? </span></span><br /><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is a sense of wonder. Perhaps of awe. We are taken out of ‘ordinary’ life and feel as if something special is being offered to us – if only for a moment or two. Part of our response to a rainbow may have to do with its transience. We know it won’t last. Do we sense that we are being shown something important about life itself: its impermanence, its fragility? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We may in the end be unsure what it is about a rainbow that we delight in. But we know that it is hard to be indifferent. It’s as if something is addressing us through this fleeting experience. Like a dream we can’t remember, its meaning seems just out of reach. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Judaism has its own mythology around the rainbow. This week we read the story of Noah, the survivor of the primeval environmental disaster the Torah calls the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mabbul</i>, the Flood. And when humanity has been destroyed and only Noah and his family remain, the sign that divine destructiveness will never again wipe out the human race or the earth itself is - the rainbow. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In a daring piece of creative storytelling, the narrators suggest that even God needs to be reminded not to let destructiveness take over. Human life is precious. Life on earth is precious. The planet is precious. “And it shall come to pass...when the rainbow is seen in the clouds, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I will remember my covenant </i>which is between Me and you and every living creature, and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. And the rainbow shall be in the clouds, and I will look upon it, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I may remember the everlasting covenant</i>between God and every living creature...” (Genesis 9: 14-16).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">So the rainbow becomes an </span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">aide-mémoire</span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"> for God. And because of this piece of mythic storytelling, the rainbow becomes a reminder for us. The covenant, the promise, has been handed on to us. The battle between creativity and destructiveness is a an ‘everlasting’ struggle not only in the heart of God, as it were, but in the human heart. The fate of the planet is now in our hands. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We know that the environmental crisis threatens the well-being of many millions of people, along with the natural world, and the animal world – so the rainbow reminds us of the fragility of all of life on the planet. It’s now in our hands. Can we keep faith with the covenant, the promise?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That this precious jewel in the crown of the created universe must never be ruined or destroyed? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">How can we keep ourselves sensitised to the spiritual task we have been set (which is also a social and political task), the sacred destiny we have taken upon ourselves – to preserve and nurture this precious life on earth (and the life of the earth) that we so enjoy? Perhaps we need to be encouraged to appreciate moments of wonder, moments like seeing a rainbow. Perhaps we need to be helped to develop an attitude of what Rabi Abraham Joshua Heschel called "radical amazement" at the extraordinary richness and diversity and abundance of life that exists at every moment. Perhaps we need to refine our sensitivity to how much is wondrous in the unfolding life of the world. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This may be less difficult than we imagine. For we all know these moments of wonder. Moments when we feel as if we are seeing the world – or something in the world, or someone – for the first time. Moments when we become finely attuned to the rhythm and pulse of life. Moments when life is filled with ‘nowness’.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Holding in your arms your new-born child. Gazing awestruck at the stars in the night sky. That first glance across a room - eyes meeting - at a party you didn’t want to go to. Watching the sun set over the ocean. Walking in the mountains - experiencing the grandeur of the natural world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Or just digging over the earth, appreciating the gifts of your own humble garden. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Listening to certain kinds of music, Beethoven’s late sonatas;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>or singing Handel’s Messiah in a choir. Celebrating a life event in your family, or with friends – sharing moments of joy. Confronting the death of someone we love, or a stranger: bearing with the process, offering comfort and support. These moments of ‘nowness’ – what the medieval German Christian mystic Meister Eckhart called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Istigkeit</i> ‘is-ness’ - can come in all sorts of situations. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Through sharing food, or in sex, or through silence. </span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">Through doing a piece of work with precise attention to what is happening at each moment, </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">the nowness of creativity. Through being <span style="color: black;">fully engaged in helping someone in need, simple acts of compassion or generosity.</span> Speaking in depth with another person, or <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>listening in depth: creating moments of intimacy, of meeting, of what Martin Buber calls <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Begegnung/<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></i>‘encounter’. </span><span class="st1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Alles wirkliche Leben ist <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Begegnung</span></span></i></span><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> – "all real living is meeting/encounter". </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">We know these moments, they are precious, life-affirming – but none of them d<span style="color: black;">epend </span></span><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">necessarily</span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"> on belief in a divine ‘Being’ or on being part of a religious tradition. The most supposedly secular of hearts can still experience these moments of wonder, of nowness. What is important is to recognise them, appreciate them - and appreciate too that we have a responsibility to support each other and protect the planet so that such moments can be available for generations to come. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">A rainbow is like a mini-revelation of a different dimension of reality, that is always with us, but also outside our grasp, beyond us, uncontrollable by us. The poet </span><span class="st1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">William Blake captured this, the potential for each moment to reveal something to us: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’</i>. Moments of wonder come to us unexpectedly - t</span></span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">hey can’t be forced. And yet we sense that can hold ourselves open to them. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Judaism traditionally had a way of helping us keep ourselves open to moments of wonder, of nowness; of helping us nurture our ‘radical amazement’ about the grandeur and mystery of life. Of helping us feel gratitude. And therefore a sense of responsibility for the nurturing of life in all its forms. The rabbis of old developed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a series of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">b’rachot</i> – ‘blessings’ – for such occasions: on seeing the wonders of nature; on smelling spices, or perfumes, or flowers; on eating fruit; on drinking wine; on hearing thunder; on seeing the sea; on seeing trees in blossom for the first time. And a blessing too on seeing a rainbow: </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Blessed are You, our Living God, Sovereign of the Universe, You remember Your covenant and are faithful to it, and keep your promise.</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"></span></i>&nbsp;</div><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #dff2ff; color: #333333; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 13px/20.8px Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: calibri;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></span></span>&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #dff2ff; color: #333333; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 13px/20.8px Georgia, serif; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: calibri;"><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: medium;">[ This piece first appeared&nbsp;as one of a series of weekly 'Rabbi-in-Residence' pieces I am writing&nbsp;from September - November 2016 that are appearing in JEU, the online journal of&nbsp;Paideia:&nbsp;The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden&nbsp;</span><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://en-gb.facebook.com/paideiaFB/">https://en-gb.facebook.com/paideiaFB/</a>&nbsp;]</span></o:p></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #dff2ff; color: #333333; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: large/20.8px calibri; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px;"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /></div></span><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><br /></div></span><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><br /></div></i><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span></i>&nbsp;</div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-42830065751674625022016-10-30T12:39:00.000+00:002016-10-30T12:39:04.385+00:00Reflections on Order and Chaos in the Hebrew Bible - and the Shame of Calais <span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">Watching, listening to and reading about the dismantling of the Calais refugee settlement this last week has been a disheartening, dementing experience. It seemed that chaos was the order of the day. Some brave souls on both sides of the Channel have been battling the callousness of the UK and French governments and insisting on the absolute priority of safeguarding the well-being of the children and youngsters gathered there – but that it is voluntary organizations and charities that are representing the necessary ethical commitment is a sad indictment of governments who can hide behind their assumption that many citizens have other priorities.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span><br /> <br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">In this they are aided and abetted by the raucous, demeaning aggression of the UK’s tabloid press towards these vulnerable youngsters, which allows the UK government to get away with shamefully small steps towards addressing the crisis. The hypocrisy of the right-wing press knows no bounds here – on the one hand children must always be kept away from harm, and danger and possible exploitation: the safety and well-being of children is regularly promoted as an almost sacred duty.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">On the other hand, this only applies to ‘our’ children. Other children – ‘foreign’ children – need to be left to fend for themselves and are not welcome here. There are times when the veneer of civilisation in which we paint our self-image is scraped mercilessly thin, and the ugly, raw blood and bones of our deeper, loathsome (actually, self-loathing) selves is exposed to full view.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">These thoughts this last week coincided with themes I’ve been reflecting on about order and chaos, and the relationship between these forces in our daily lives: our need for order, rhythms and the security of knowing how things might unfold – and the way in which these fundamental human wishes keep getting subverted by the forces of chaos and disorder that lie just below the surface of life; or indeed are present within the very flux of daily life.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">And I have been reflecting on these themes because this week Jews around the world began again the weekly cycle of readings from the Torah. And there, from the very beginning of this great mythic drama of Western consciousness, the Bible, we find a portrait of the dynamic tension between order and chaos.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">You know how the drama begins. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’. </i>It’s so familiar that we might not pause to wonder at it, this portrait of a Creator: a mysterious force giving purposeful form and imaginative shape to creation. An artist-designer-choreographer shaping and ordering a world which comes into being moment by moment. In a piece of magisterial story-telling the Biblical narrators offer us a picture of creation unfolding stage by stage in seven ordered and systematic stages. And we are the culmination of this divine activity: in this mythic, poetic story <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">humanity is the purpose of creation</i>. In this ancient text, in an act of extraordinary creative thinking, the Jewish people gave birth to the idea of something giving birth to the idea of us.&nbsp;</span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">Although we are now living – remarkably! - in an age that knows that the universe is 13.82 billion years old, the Judaic cultural imagination was never as interested in the question ‘when did it begin?’ as the questions ‘what is it for?’ and ‘how does it hold together?’ And these questions are revealed when we look carefully at the text – for this portrait of creation <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>is fraught with ambiguity. For how are we to read the opening sentences of the Torah?&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">We immediately have a problem. The translation I offered above does not seem quite right: the influential Biblical commentator, the medieval scholar Rashi, looked at the grammatical form of the first word of this poetic text -- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">B’reshit</i>-- and saw that it was not free-standing, but introduces a dependent clause: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘In the beginning <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">of</b> ...’</i> . Rashi is reading close to the grain of the original Hebrew text, where there are no verse divisions: he suggests that the opening of the Bible should be read at one stretch, as a continuous thought. Something like: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘In the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth -- the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the deep and an energy from God sweeping over the water -- God said: “Let there be light” and there was light’.&nbsp;</i></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">So how did creation begin? According to this translation (and remember that every translation is an interpretation), the original creative process <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">begins</i>with God ‘speaking’: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Let there be...”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Rashi’s reading is thus in agreement with the author of the Fourth Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the word’. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Existence is formed out of language.</i>Here the Hebrew Bible distances itself from other contemporary Near Eastern creation myths. There are no divine genealogies or battles between the gods, no rituals to be re-enacted to ensure the supremacy of the national god. All of that is abandoned in favour of the ‘word’, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">logos</i>of John’s Greek text, the logic of the beginning - a beginning through speech. In this view of creation, time and chronology are subservient to language. ‘Time...worships language’, as the poet W.H.Auden once wrote.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">This view of creation as an ongoing act of articulation by ‘God’ resonates with the Jewish mystical tradition, which pictures the universe as being created out of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet: their continuing combination and re-combination makes up the substance of our being and that of the world. All of matter, including ourselves (our human ‘being’), flow from the original speech-act that emerged from the divine ‘Being’. Existence is the sum of the ongoing echoes, responses, reverberations from that original <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Let there be light...”</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>(Genesis1:3).&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">This is akin to the popular view of artistic creativity as occurring in a flash of inspiration, a moment of revelation. Suddenly everything is just there: the whole poem, the complete melody, the entire story. Yet although there are artists’ accounts which reinforce this view, they are in the minority.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>More frequent are accounts of the creative process which suggest something very different takes place in the struggle to produce something out of nothing. And this takes us to a second, and radically different, reading of our creation story.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">Those who have come to the Bible through translations into English will perhaps be most familiar with the 1611 King James ‘Authorized’ Version. It begins with that familiar and bold declaration: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. </i>End of sentence. That punctuation mark – not there in the Hebrew – creates a statement that stands as a kind of prologue, a headline, for the subsequent events. As if it were staying: ‘The following is the story of how, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">And then verse 2 provides, quite literally, a pro-logue: what existed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i> the logic of God’s speaking-the-world-into-being. This is not a creation out of nothing (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ex nihilo</i>), but creation out of the midst of a dark, primeval void: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2) Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. 3) And God said: “Let there be light”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And there was light.’&nbsp;</i></span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">Suddenly we see the huge reservoir of potentially destructive forces that exist <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before God speaks. </i>We have the ‘unformed and void’: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tohu va’vohu<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></i>(‘chaos and confusion’ is perhaps a better translation). And ‘darkness’. And ‘the deep’ (or ‘the chasm’, ‘the abyss’). In our second reading we discover - with surprise? with anxiety? - that God does not create everything. For example, the ‘darkness’ exists independently, before the light. In this reading of creation there is drama, struggle, even a sense of improvisation. There is a deep insecurity about the whole enterprise.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">According to one fifth-century rabbinic homiletic commentary (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">midrash</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Genesis Rabbah 9:4</i>), the world did not spring forth all at once from God’s omnipotent will, but 26 attempts preceded the creation. All of them were doomed to failure. The world as we now have it came out of the chaotic midst of this earlier wreckage. Does this sound like the stuff of primitive science-fiction? Perhaps. But this midrashic tradition of the fragility and impermanence of the creative process is spiritually and psychologically significant.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">For here humanity is an experiment. There is always the risk of failure and the return to chaos and nothingness. The uncertainty of every aspiring artist reverberates within this stream of mythic thinking. God’s anxious cry of hope at the end of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">midrash</i> - ‘If only this time it will last!’ - accompanies human history, and our own lives within in.&nbsp;</span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">Our first reading of the opening of Genesis invited us into a harmonious world of language, logic and ordered inevitability. Our second reading opens up the possibility that insecurity and impermanence is built into the makeup of the world and the fabric of our consciousness. Our first reading offers us a world<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>where things should make sense; where there is order and security. Our second reading offers us a world of ‘chaos and confusion’ – a world in which ‘darkness’ is the starting point and a sense of provisionality accompanies the unfolding of everyday life.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">The genius of the Biblical narrators lies in how they manage to suggest - in the few opening verses of their story, in the guise of an evocation of Creation - such diverse readings, interpretations, of life. They somehow intuited that we would spend our lives, individually and collectively, stretched out between our wish for order, rhythm, logic, security – and our awareness of how close is the ‘abyss’, how powerful are the forces of ‘chaos and confusion’, how ‘darkness’ is part of the fabric of life, how near we always are to a collapse back into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tohu va’vohu</i>. Calais this last week has revealed how close we are to this.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;;">That <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">midrash </i></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">is deeply subversive: the rabbis saw deeply into the ambiguity in the text and gave us a God that isn’t omnipotent or omniscient. Their God is a participant with us in the not-knowing how things will turn out. Is life on earth a doomed project? We don’t know, we can’t know, nobody knows. This is a picture filled with fear and trembling, with hope and wishfulness - but no certainty. It is suggesting that in regard to the world we live in, it could all end in failure. It could all – our so-called civilisation, and us, and this fragile planet – be sucked back into the depths of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tohu va’vohu</i>.&nbsp;</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">When at the end of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">midrash</i>God is allowed a voice and looks around and cries out, in hope, in anxiety, ‘If only this time it will last!’, of course this is our hope, and our anxiety, that the rabbis are giving voice to - projected onto the Holy One of Israel. The hope that our lives, and the life of humanity, are part of a scheme of things that will last.&nbsp;</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">So this is how the Torah begins – opening up for us existential insecurity inside a supposedly ordered creation. How we manage that innate insecurity is a test of our humanity – do we bring ‘light’ into the world? Or do we let ‘darkness’ reign? We contain both, the potential for both. Which force, which energy, will win the day? For us, for our world.&nbsp;</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">[developed from some thoughts shared at Finchley Reform Synagogue, October 29<sup>th</sup>, 2016]<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-86920994930664269192016-10-20T17:34:00.000+01:002016-10-20T17:34:58.689+01:00Reflections on Simchat Torah and a Kafka Parable<span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">And so we come to the close of the spiritual year. But this is a paradoxical closure – for it’s a closure in which the door to new beginnings is left wide open. On <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Simchat Torah</i> – added to the end of the festival of impermanence, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sukkot</i> - the slow, regular, week-by-week progression of the Jewish liturgical year, based on the cycle of weekly readings from the Torah, comes to an end. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;"></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">We read the last verses of the Torah where Moses, a legendary 120 years old, goes up the mountain overlooking the so-called ‘promised land’, the land of Canaan, and before he dies he is allowed to look at the inheritance which has been promised to his people. ‘You can look at it, but you can’t touch it, eat from it’ – the message to humanity at the beginning of the Torah about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil finds its symbolic echo at the end of the Torah in God’s refusal to allow Moses more than a glimpse of what the whole wilderness journey has been leading to. He cannot enter the land. It is the next generation who will inherit the land. It is always the next generation whom we believe will fulfil our dreams of a better tomorrow. So the Torah ends on this bitter-sweet moment of loss – and hope deferred. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">But on this festival of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Simchat Torah</i>, the pain of unfulfilled longing immediately segues into a new beginning. The opening verses of the book of Genesis follow on straight away and the holy drama begins again. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...’ Moses has died, but creation is renewed. The journey is over, we have failed to reach our destination. And the journey is beginning again, and all lies before us, waiting. “In my end is my beginning” (T.S.Eliot, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Four Quartets</i>). </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">When we dance with the Torah on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Simchat Torah</i> we are celebrating the return to the beginning, we are celebrating the renewal of our quest for a story that can give meaning to our lives. We are rejoicing in the unending journey of our people towards a destiny which can never be fulfilled. As Franz Rosenzweig puts it: “this close of the spiritual year is not permitted to be an actual close but must flow back into the beginning...the last word in the Torah gives rise to the first.” In the liturgical year, the spiritual year, we never reach the ‘promised land’. We are always journeying. The spiritual journey itself<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>– personal and collective - is our destination, our homeland. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">The Jewish people, a people who have survived the vicissitudes of history, are a people on an endless journey through time, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>a people whose sense of journeying is evoked in Franz Kafka’s incomparable parable:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">I gave orders for my horse to be brought round from the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call, I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking: ’Where are you riding to, master?’ ‘I do not know’, I said, ‘only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.’ ‘And so you know your destination?’, he asked. ‘Yes’, I answered, ‘didn’t I say so? Away-From-Here, that is my destination.’ ‘You have no provisions with you,’ he said. ‘I need none,’ I said, ‘the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’ </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">‘Fortunately’ – ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">es ist ja zum Glück’</i> – what a wonderful sense of celebration, anticipation, hopefulness is evoked! That concluding phrase, and indeed the whole parable, is one of the great religious commentaries on the story of the Jewish people. A contemporary <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">midrash </i>to stand alongside the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">midrashim</i> of old. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">What thoughts come to mind as we ponder on Kafka’s parable? We have the destiny of the Jewish people not to be understood; and to have to rely on themselves. They are attuned to a call, a summons, that they alone can hear – Kafka’s bugle (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trompete</i>) is a close relative of the shofar, present at the revelation at Sinai when the people learn of the moral and ethical vision they are to enact; the shofar that in the tradition also announces the coming of the Messianic age and the redemption of humanity. And the journey is always ‘Away-From-Here’,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>away from the compromises and disappointments, defeats and suffering of everyday personal life, away from the empty promises and false solutions and unending conflicts of social and political life. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">And if there are ‘no provisions’ that can be prepared in advance to help us cope with the dramas of life, then we are like the children of Israel in the wilderness who depend on receiving manna from the Eternal One - their lesson in dependence, their lesson on the hubris of believing that we can be masters of our own fate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Nothing can save us, Kafka intuits – channelling his innate understanding of the Judaic story as portrayed in the texts of old – unless we are open to receive what life offers us day by day. This is the daily miracle – we receive what we need to keep us going. And we do keep on going – day after day, generation after generation. ‘For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.’ </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;">The Hebrew word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">torah</i>is from the root <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">y’r’h</i> – ‘to point in a direction’. It’s used of an archer shooting arrows. Torah is not only ‘Law’ – forbiddingly revealed for all time, static and unchanging. Torah is about the direction we are called upon to move. It is the lightning flash of insight when we see the way ahead. It is what we hear when we listen in deeply to the call to our better selves, to enact moments of messianic hopefulness through our compassion, our generosity, our passion for justice. It is the moment of knowing how we have to act. On <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Simchat Torah</i> we celebrate both the Torah of tradition – that creative wellspring of stories and legends, ethical teachings <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>and social responsibilities - and the ‘Torah’ of our own times, the teachings and wisdom of voices like Kafka, sometimes far from the mainstream of traditional Jewish texts, that nevertheless flow towards us and nurture our souls. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"></span><span style="font-size: large;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot; , &quot;sans-serif&quot;;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: large;">[This piece is one of a series of weekly 'Rabbi-in-Residence' pieces I am writing&nbsp;from September - November 2016 that are appearing in JEU, the online journal of&nbsp;Paideia:&nbsp;The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden&nbsp;</span><a href="https://en-gb.facebook.com/paideiaFB/"><span style="font-size: large;">https://en-gb.facebook.com/paideiaFB/</span></a><o:p><span style="font-size: large;">&nbsp;]</span></o:p></span></span></span></div><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;; font-size: large;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br /></div><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;times new roman&quot;; font-size: large;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"></span>&nbsp;</div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-91842908794878455482016-10-06T20:25:00.000+01:002016-10-06T20:25:08.058+01:00Challenging our Assumptions about Learning and Liturgy - and What We Need to Help Us to Fly. <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A few years ago a team of psychologists set up an experiment with some pre-school children. They gave the children a toy made of lots of plastic tubes. Each tube had something different about it. One tube squeaked when you touched it. One lit up. One tube made music. One had a mirror hidden inside it. With half the children, one of the psychologists came into the room and – as if by accident – bumped into the tube that squeaked. “Oops!”, she said as the tube squeaked. The children were then left alone to play with the toy. The psychologist-team watched to see what happened next. What do you think they observed?&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span><br /><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The other half of the children had a different experience. The psychologist came into the room and acted more like a teacher, picking up the toy and saying enthusiastically “Look at my great toy! Let me show you how it works” and then pressing the tube that squeaked, which of course it did. The children were then left alone to play with the toy, with the psychologist-team<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>watching to see what happened next in that group of children. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Although Rosh Hashanah is the time of the year when we are asking ourselves ‘what will happen next? how will our next year unfold?’, we don’t usually have any window, any vantage point, from which we can observe the action. We are in that sense like the children being tested to see how we respond to what life presents us with. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>We are still as a people, the children of Israel, caught up in something bigger than we know, larger than we understand. Part of the religious work, the spiritual work, of this time of the year is to see if we can get a different vantage point onto our daily lives. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But back to the experiment. What do you think the psychologist team saw happening in the first group of children, the one where there’d been this ‘accidental’ bumping into the toy, which then squeaked?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That group, they found, began playing with the toy in all sorts of random ways, pulling, pushing, prodding, until<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>gradually they discovered all the functions of the tubes: the light, the music, the mirror. And the other group? Those children who’d been enthusiastically shown how the squeaking part of the tube worked – those who’d been deliberately taught, had their attention directed, by the experimenter – they played with the tube in a much more limited and repetitive way. ‘Squeak, squeak! Squeak, squeak!’ – they hardly ever discovered all the other things the toy could do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When I came across this piece of research – it’s from Alison Gopnik’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Gardener and the Carpenter</i>, she’s a Jewish professor of both psychology and philosophy at Berkeley, California - I have to say that I found it quite unsettling, disquieting. It seemed at first quite counter-intuitive. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Surely if you are just left to find things out for yourself, randomly, you could end up lost, bored, frustrated, distressingly all-at-sea. And if you are directed in your learning, your discovery of what’s in the world, by an enthusiastic teacher – can’t they open up things for you that you might never find by yourself, hidden wonders you’d never otherwise come across on your own? So this research seemed to undermine some basic assumptions of mine. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It is quite destabilising to think: have I got something fundamentally<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>wrong? will I have to think again about how I see the world, build it up again with different foundations? These are High Holy Day questions, I suppose – certainly they are pertinent to the self-examination we are encouraged to undertake -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>but they weren’t questions I welcomed when I came across this peer-reviewed research. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But the more I thought about this experiment, the more I realised the truth embedded within it, and the more significant, profound, I found it. And still find it. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I thought back to my own childhood and realised just how self-directing my learning had been. I’d go to the local library and just take out whatever books captured my imagination. There were lots of books at home too, but I never remember being told, by either of my parents, ‘you really must read that’. They just left me to it - a sort of blessing in disguise, I now realise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>At secondary school<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>there were some texts that were set - novels to read, poems to learn - and I am grateful for those because, perhaps fortunately, they didn’t narrow my focus but made me realise how much there was to discover. But on the whole I can now see how free I was both as a child and then an adolescent to find my own way – and not just in literature and poetry, but in music and art and films as well. Looking back, I can see that I was embarked on a lifetime of exploring what interested me, allowing<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>randomness and serendipity and chance to do its work.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That lack of external direction has, I think, allowed me to be relatively eclectic and wide-ranging in following my own enthusiasms and not anyone else’s. (It has also meant that I have vast areas of ignorance). But what about studying to become<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a rabbi? Obviously at<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Leo Baeck College there was a huge amount of directedness that went on; historically, traditionally, there’s a strong voice of authority that says, like the one directed to that second group of kids, ‘Look over there, those are the texts that matter: Torah, Talmud, commentaries, collections of midrash, liturgical texts’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In the past Jews – not just rabbis – were clearly directed where to go for wisdom. Certain texts were solid links in a chain of tradition stretching back millennia. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But again, I was fortunate - another blessing in disguise - in that the teachers that I had at and around the College were not quite like that. Or it may be the other way round – that the teachers I found were not like that. The rabbis and teachers I gravitated towards seemed to have been the ones who, each in their own way, represented that first kind of psychologist-experimenter. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I am thinking of Rabbi Lionel Blue and Rabbi Jonathan Magonet and Rabbi Jeffrey Newman, each in their own very different-from-each-other idiosyncratic ways teaching how Jewish religious life is, in essence,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>about exploration, about a journey of discovery in which the answers aren’t always given by the past; where in fact the asking of a good question, and the exploration of where it takes you, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, is central what it means to be Jewishly religious. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I had other teachers at rabbinical college, but they didn’t enthuse me in the same way. In retrospect I can see that perhaps<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>my mind-set had already been formed – a pre-disposition towards a certain stance in relation to learning, how we learn, where we learn, who we can learn from. Where you bump into things – “oops!” – and learn from that, rather than have your learning focused by someone else. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So I leant that wisdom could be found in engaging with Christian pastors and Scottish shepherds, Dominican fathers and atheist artists, displaced poets and Sufi mystics; and that the traditional advice given at the beginning of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pirke Avot</i>, the Ethics of the Fathers, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">asay l’cha rav</i> – ‘Get yourself a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rav</i>, a teacher’ (1:6)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i>was fine<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>– and maybe important – as long as you didn’t restrict yourself to a too-narrow definition of who a teacher might be, or where new insights might come from. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All of which is to say that by looking back at my own journey I can now see that Alison Gopnik’s research experiment – and there’s a lot of other work that she and her colleagues have done that confirm her conclusions – seems to me to be on to something extremely significant about how learning takes place, what kind of direction is needed, and what gets in the way and limits a person’s development. But I still find her conclusions unsettling. Because I think the implications are far-reaching. I want to speak about two very different areas where the implications challenge, very directly, how we do things, how we think about things. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The first is parenting – which is a large part of the focus of her book ‘The Gardener and the Carpenter’. Gopnik puts it very clearly – in a sentence that might make many middle-class parents apoplectic with rage, and maybe fear : “Our job [as parents] is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows.” </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Explore all the possibilities</span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> – what, go to the local park unsupervised? choose for themselves what school they go to? what subjects to study? decide for themselves whether they do really want extra music lessons, or ballet, or to complete their Duke of Edinburgh awards? “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A parent’s job is to help youngsters explore all the possibilities that the world allows</i>”?! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>What about exploring drugs? exploring sex? exploring the vast regions of the internet? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></i>This woman needs to be locked up, we might be thinking, encouraging us to think about our parenting in the affluent West as too restrictive, as not conducive to our children’s well-being. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But if we can resist giving in to our knee-jerk reactions, we might create some space to think about the deep wisdom of what she is saying: that we might be getting in the way of our children’s overall well-being by eliminating the random, the serendipitous, by not letting them discover things for themselves - through their mistakes, and what hurts them, as well as what they might thrill to by being allowed to follow their own desires and passions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You can see all around us the results of the way children are often now being parented, and it is very painful. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>I see it and hear about it every day in my therapy consulting room: an epidemic of self-harm, eating disorders, mental health problems, in girls especially; but boys too are much more fragile than their bravado would let us know about. All that educational emphasis on outcomes and test scores and all that parental emphasis on achievement and success – along with peer pressures and the relentless presence of social media sites – has created a perfect storm of un-wellness, of dis-ease. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As parents we might want to protect our youngsters from dangers, of various kinds, but what Alison Gopnik’s book does is provoke us into thinking about the ways in which unknowingly we become collusive with and part of the problem - rather than offering a viable alternative to it. Parenting should be more like gardening than carpentry, Gopnik argues – it is about creating the best conditions for what is there to be allowed to grow, rather than hammering away at our children to shape them into what we think they need to be. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We never think about it as hammering away of course, we think it’s ‘being sensible’, ‘getting ahead’, ‘getting the most out of the opportunities you’ve been given’ - all sorts of rationalisations which our youngsters buy into, or react against, to their own detriment. Sometimes their problems appear at the time as they are growing up, sometimes it take years and then breaks out at college or university: counselling services in tertiary education are being overwhelmed with young people unable to cope. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We could widen this a bit. Beyond the current debates in the UK about grammar schools or the merits of faith schools there is a more fundamental malaise within the educational system in this country. Did you know that in Finland, which leads the world in terms of both academic achievements and reported well-being amongst school-leavers, they don’t begin to teach maths, reading and spelling until the children are seven years old?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Prior to that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>classes are structured around creative play, storytelling, interpersonal and social skills and the role of the imagination in personal development. The UK has a lot to learn: to unlearn and to learn. (Gopnik’s work is a good example of the historical role of Jews in society – to offer a critique of the status quo, to challenge the prevailing idolatry in a culture).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But I want to finish by bringing this back to ourselves as Jews on the High Holy Days. Because the other thing that unsettled me about Gopnik’s fascinating and passionate arguments is the implications for what we do in our synagogue services. She doesn’t talk in her book about the implications of her ideas for religious belief or practice, but it led me to think about it. That’s an example of her philosophy at work. I bumped into her work and then, in exploring it, I was <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>led to into quite other areas. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Because the model we have, in our liturgy and our services, is definitely the second route the experimenters took: ‘Look at this, children, see how interesting it is’ - that’s in effect what we who lead the services are saying to you. ‘Turn to page 31’, we say, ‘and we’ll sing this, or read that’. And you probably dutifully follow where you are directed. (Maybe I’m wrong and you are all secret explorers and drifters off. I really hope you are – and I am sure you’ll have heard me encouraging you to use this time to wander through the book, or follow where your mind takes you . But now I have Gopnik’s research to back up my intuitions!). </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But if you do just feel an obligation to dutifully follow along, then<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>- if we think about that through the lens of Alison Gopnik’s work - what we are in effect doing is narrowing your choices and potential adventures<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>during these services, rather than expanding the possibilities of what you could find out and discover for yourselves if we took that different, first-experimenter approach. I think this is one of the underlying reasons why so many people are put off my formal religious services – and this may be true of Christianity as well as Judaism.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So the question I want to leave with you with is this: how would Jews do services differently if we took a ‘Oops!’ approach to the liturgy? If we used the time to bump into things rather than be directed towards them? I’m sure our services would look very different and feel very different. Could we bear a service which wasn’t guided so rigidly from on high – and I’m not speaking about from heaven? A service where we left gaps of time for congregants to wander through the liturgy until they found something that caught their eye? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>and then maybe, if they wanted to , have a conversation with their neighbour about what they had found significant in it? A service where we did just a fraction of the liturgy and then used it to see where our own thoughts, our own psyche, took us next? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">S</span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">ervices like that might take us out of our comfort zone - but they would allow space for the unconscious to work, allow space for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ruach hakodesh</i>, the spirit of divine energy within us, to breathe in us and enlighten us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>These would be services in the spirit of Shakespeare’s ‘By indirections find directions out ‘ (Hamlet, Act 2, scene1). They would be services where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kavannah</i>– inner attentiveness to what unfolds within us moment by moment - was given more space than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">keva</i>, what is fixed and determined by tradition. They would be services that would - to use traditional language - allow God in. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Why don’t we try to wander, to digress, to use the words in our prayer books as springboards into deeper regions of our own soul and heart and mind. Can we make space for chance things to arise in our mind - random thoughts and associations – and follow them, see where they lead. See what can be discovered by bumping into words and images from these texts – allow oneself to be surprised , embarrassed, moved, gratified, ashamed, excited, whatever comes up. See what hurts, see what gives pleasure. Think of our services as an adventure playground and not a place where we have to dutifully tick the boxes of prayers read, songs sung, pages covered. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What kind of adventure playground do we want our services to be? At the moment we are too often like a butterfly pinned to a wheel: we are not only being cruel to ourselves, but we are stopping ourselves flying spiritually, religiously. I can’t believe that in our hearts we want that. But what do we want? What do our souls really need? I leave you with that question. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, October 4<sup>th</sup>, 2016]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;Georgia&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-63223002357540871222016-09-25T17:31:00.000+01:002016-09-25T17:31:14.571+01:00Preparing for the New Year with 'Alice in Wonderland' <span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">...suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so </span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt;">very <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">remarkable in that: nor did Alice think it so </i>very<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural)... </i><o:p></o:p></span></span><br /> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I guess you didn’t know that everything we need for the High Holy Days – spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, maybe even intellectually – everything we might need to guide us through these days, is on the opening page of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice in Wonderland</i>. Who would have imagined it? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As the story begins Alice is sitting on a river bank next to her sister who is reading a book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘but it had no pictures or conversations in it’</i>, writes Lewis Carroll<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, ‘ ”and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”’. </i>Like the Anglican deacon Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who knew a lot about having to engage with books without pictures and conversations – books of hymns, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer – Jews know what it means to be stuck with a book like that: the liturgy of the Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement is thin on pictures and devoid of conversations - the very stuff that might make it come alive imaginatively. Who over these High Holy Days hasn’t unknowingly echoed Alice’s disappointed complaint? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Of course the Jewish liturgy does have pictures of a different kind – word pictures. There’s some vivid imagery:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a Book of Life, a Court of Law, a Judge and King waiting and reaching out to a chastened community, a searching community seeking forgiveness, atonement, wholeness; the closing of the gates as the souls rush to be included in the gathering of life as the final Neilah service draws to a close: these are the word pictures we play and wrestle with each year. But as for the conversation, it is a bit...let’s say, one-sided. We do a lot of talking, praying,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>singing,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>beseeching, repeating, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>rehearsing the familiar stories and themes and motifs - but it’s basically a monologue, not a dialogue. It’s not really, hand on heart, a conversation. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">To have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">HaKadosh Baruch Hu</i> as a dialogue partner, the 'Holy One of Israel', is always going to be a daunting task. It’s not conversation as we know it, the kind of conversation that enlivens us, or stretches us, or provokes us, or nurtures us, or inspires us, or consoles us. Or am I being too harsh? Could we make it that? What would that look like? What would that feel like? If our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">machzor</i> (prayer book) was a place, a space, for that kind of conversation? If our word-pictures helped us into that kind of conversation, the kind that we cherish? If our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">machzor</i> opened up for us an imaginative space where we experienced something alive, a presence animating the space and the words? This is something to think about for these forthcoming days – how do we engage with the liturgy as if it’s part of a dynamic conversation? Is that possible? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Alice gives up with the book her sister is reading. She turns aside, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘considering </i>[things]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> in her own mind’</i> as Carroll puts it. She turns aside, turns inwards and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>– like Moses at the burning bush – when she turns aside and turns inwards, she suddenly sees something: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">...suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.</i> High Holy Days is the time we turn aside, turn inwards, and try to see what’s there. We look around us and into ourselves and ask: What’s going on that we haven’t seen up till now? What’s the story that we are in? What’s the story our lives are part of? And who’s writing the story? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">At this time of the year we are always encouraged to remember: “Days are scrolls, write on what you want to be remembered” (Bachya ibn Pakuda, 1050-1120). But there’s a partial illusion in this: I don’t think <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>we should get too carried away with thinking that we are the authors of our own lives. First of all it’s a statement that – like all the traditional liturgy itself – comes from an era that didn’t realise we have an unconscious, we have a part of ourselves that is out of conscious sight and control and can subvert our best intentions. Having an unconscious means that all this Jewish religious talk about free will and consciously changing ourselves through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">teshuvah</i>needs to be treated with caution. Days may be scrolls - but a lot of the time the best we can do is write a few footnotes to the text that unfolds in front of us – I do love footnotes, mind you, they are sometimes the most creative part of a text. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The reality of our lives is that most of the time we are responding to stuff that comes at us. Stuff happens – to us or to the ones we love and care about -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>and often it’s painful stuff. The things that appear in our lives are not always the things we want: ill-health, loss of a job, loss of a parent, or a partner, or a child, loss of a relationship. We might write our response, but we are always being reminded that we are part of a bigger picture of events that happen to us without our asking for them. This is the time of the year when we reflect on all this, and how we respond to what life throws at us. Sometimes of course there are wonderful things that happen to us, unexpectedly, and we feel grateful, we feel blessed. We do know when it feels good to be alive. Sometimes we glimpse how the world is tinged with the miraculous. We have our White Rabbit moments. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But don’t we also recognise, deep inside us, what Alice hears the Rabbit say to itself? : <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” </i></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I don’t think it is only a question of how old we are, that this question can be so powerful, so oppressive: the question of ‘too late’. I don’t think you have to be in your 60s, 70s, 80s to feel the force of this, I think you can feel it in your 20s and 30s, any age : ‘it’s too late’ – too late to find that special relationship, too late to have the family I want, or the friends, too late to have job satisfaction, too late to fulfil my ambitions, my hopes, too late to rid myself of my anxieties and fears, too late to learn a new language, a new skill, too late to exorcise the malign influence of my past, too late to heal that relationship, heal that old wound... “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”</i> – we feel it as ‘it is too late’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But what this period of the Jewish year that we are entering into says to us, promises us, is : <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it’s not too late</i>. Not yet. That’s what the Talmud intuits when It tells us the story of Rabbi Eliezer, who says to his disciples ‘Repent one day before your death’ and they naturally respond to him: ‘Does that mean one is supposed to know when one will die?’ And Eliezer replies, in effect, ‘I think you get it: you don’t know how long you have in this world so you need to be attending to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">teshuvah</i>– returning, changing - every day of your life.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>In other words: It’s never too late. It’s never too late for something to change – in us, to us. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Of course none of us lives each day as if it were our last – that would be sort of unbearable - but we have been gifted a period each year (these <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yamim Noraim</i>, Days of Awe) when we can focus on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">teshuvah</i>, change: our capacity to change <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before it is too late.</i> We may <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feel</i>it’s too late – “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”,</i> but we are entering a period when we are reminded: it’s not too late. It’s never ‘too late’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I am focusing on the personal here, because that is at the heart of these days: ourselves as individuals and our capacity to change in such a way that our better selves are allowed to emerge, or have more room to grow. We as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">individuals</i>are at the heart of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>this collective call for change, for return; but the High Holy Days remind us that this call to change – and this question of ‘too lateness’ – is also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">collective</i>. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We know that our lives, fragile and vulnerable as they are, are held in a web of connections to community, and nation, and the community of nations that exist on this fragile and vulnerable planet: concentric circles of interconnection that bind us in to the fabric of life on this planet. And this dilemma of ‘too lateness’ haunts the imagination. It echoes through each of these concentric circles. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Think of the issues we face as a Jewish community. Is it too late to save our Jewish community from being overwhelmed by the toxic spillage that has seeped into so much of the discourse in the public domain around Israel and the Palestinians? We are coming up this year to 50 years of occupation and it has had an effect, for two generations now, on how Jews are seen throughout the world. This isn’t fair but it is a reality we are aware of, even if we hate it being the case. Is it too late to change the flow of history in the Middle East? It laps onto our shores we just see as natural – synagogues with heavy security, CCTV cameras, shut away behind high walls... “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural...”</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>But it’s not natural. And we need to wonder at this. Occupation is not natural. Injustice is not natural. Security guards checking us in and out is not natural. But is it all too late? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And what about our country? Is it too late for the United Kingdom? This year we have had to face the possibility that it is. That act of national self-harm that was Brexit has happened. Too late to change it. We have to live with the consequences. And find out nationally what it is not too late for, what can still change for the better. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And is it too late for the larger issues to be addressed in ways that are on the side of life, rather than death? Is it too late to solve creatively and compassionately the European humanitarian crisis over refugees and displaced families and children? Is it too late to stop the poisonous xenophobia and racism that is stalking every country in Europe from gradually taking over? Is it too late, now that the Arctic ice (as we heard this week) has shrunk to its smallest ever size, is it too late to change the rising of tides, the flooding of cities, the droughts and the floods and the food shortages that will overtake the planet this century as the temperatures keep on rising?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All these questions are in play as we enter our New Year. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” </i>Who knew that Alice in Wonderland was a prophetic text? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But lets’ come back to our little lives, our own hugely significant and insignificant lives. I have been asking: what should we be wondering at, that’s in front of our eyes in these concentric circles – but don’t wonder at, just grow accustomed to, just treat as natural, the way things are, even though they aren’t <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>natural. I want to end though by turning this marvellous sentence by Lewis Carroll in the other direction, closer to his intention perhaps: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural...”</i> What should we be reflecting on that we take for granted - but should in fact be a source of wonder? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What do we fail to see in front of our eyes – Alice saw her White Rabbit, Moses saw his burning bush – but what do we fail to see that is an intimation of something exceptional, something made present that can inspire, can enlighten, can illumine, can transform, can enliven and stir us in our lives? These High Holy Days are a special opportunity for opening our eyes – to see something we have never seen before. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What is our White Rabbit going to be? Which direction will it come from? Who will bring it? What shape will it be? Who will be it? What will this new insight look like? This new understanding? What is going to be revealed to us, in us? The promise of these days, these weeks in front of us, is that something will occur, something will appear – only we as individuals will see it, only we will notice it, each one of us - <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>because it is only for us. If, like Alice, we turn aside, turn inwards, it will happened: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>something new will be given to us, something that stirs our imagination, our hopefulness, our resolve, something that counters our deep fear “I shall be too late” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>– no wonder the rabbis called this period the ‘Days of Awe’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><strong>[based on a Selichot sermon given on the evning of September 24th 2016 at the Finchley Reform Synagogue, London]<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-80548996228364832072016-08-08T12:27:00.000+01:002016-08-08T12:27:25.087+01:00"What Is Essential Is Invisible To The Eye" <span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">‘The Little Prince’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>(<i><a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Petit_Prince" title="fr:Le Petit Prince"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Le Petit Prince</span></a></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">), by </span>the French writer and aviator </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry" title="Antoine de Saint-Exupéry"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Antoine de Saint-Exupéry</span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, was published in 1943, a year before the author’s death<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>-<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>he was probably shot down during a reconnaissance mission for the French Air Force. I</span></span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">t’s a poetic </span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">tale, simply told, in which a pilot stranded in the desert (desert settings are a staple of the Torah narratives too) meets a young prince who has fallen to Earth from a tiny <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid" title="Asteroid"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">asteroid</span></a>. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"></span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The story is a philosophical allegory about the search for love, for relationships that matter, for inner peace – and about the complications that arise in all those human enterprises. One of the key ‘messages’ of the tale is uttered by a fox, who meets the young prince during his travels on Earth, and eventually tells him : "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes." </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Simplistic and sentimental as this may seem, we could call this a very ‘Jewish’ insight; or at least -</span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry" title="Antoine de Saint-Exupéry"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"> Saint-Exupéry</span></a> was not Jewish – an insight that resonates strongly with a Jewish religious and spiritual understanding. After all, this is how our storytellers in the Torah present the dilemma for the Hebrew people – a dilemma they faced from the wilderness days until today: if you have a God, a divine force, an energy that animates all being, that cannot be seen, cannot be pictured – except in words – then what is essential is indeed ‘invisible to the eyes’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This text from ‘The Little Prince’ came to mind when I looked at the section of the Torah we were to read this week: Numbers 33. On the surface it seemed a rather dreary list of place names – there are 42 in the chapter – starting with Ramses in Egypt before the crossing of the Sea of Reeds, and finishing in Moab, at the edge of the Jordan river, opposite Jericho. But as we read the verses we notice that it isn’t a mere route map – in places we are given tiny vignettes that jog the historical memory. So Ramses isn’t just the start of the journey, it’s the place they left as the Egyptians are still burying their first-born (33:4), a poignant reminder of the cost of the Exodus in human lives, and a stern reminder that the God of Israel is not only a force for redemption and liberation but is also portrayed as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a destructive force as well - something the people came to discover to their own cost during their 40 years wandering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In addition, there’s the reminder that the people left Egypt defiantly, ‘high-handedly’ – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">b’yad rama</i> (33:3) – and we realize that what is being recoded here for the next generation isn’t just a dry list, an itinerary of stops on a journey, but a series of reminiscences, memory-bursts of historical moments, triggered by the geographical locations. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And we know – though the text don’t mention it – that this is an historical and geographical record for a generation who weren’t there at the beginning of the journey. Only Joshua and Caleb of the previous generation survive the wilderness years. Once Moses dies, as he will before the people cross over the Jordan, those two are the only ones who hold the collective memory of the people, a people for whom ‘Egypt’ is already a mythic event. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And we realize that is this what happens in every generation – events in the past slip over the horizon of time behind us and disappear from active memory. This has happened recently to the First World War – we have film and diaries and letters, of course, but nobody who holds it inside themselves any more as a lived experience: ‘I was there, I saw this, I felt this’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>This will happen quite soon – 20 years or so? - to the Holocaust. What is essential <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">becomes</i>invisible to the eyes. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And so we have our list in chapter 33, each place bearing a memory, but most of the memories passed over in silence. Then suddenly a detail is added – Elim, we hear, is the place of 12 springs and 70 palm trees (33:9):<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>symbolically, one spring for each tribe and one palm tree for each of the 70 elders mentioned in the Torah texts (Exodus 24:1; Numbers 11:25). So these incidental details open up windows onto larger horizons of the people’s experience. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But for me what is most striking – and this takes us back to our quotation from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Saint-Exupéry – is what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">isn’t</i> mentioned in this text which describes a written record of the desert journey being composed for posterity. An experience you might have thought was ‘essential’, but ‘invisible to the eye’. And that is what happened at Mt. Sinai. Between verse 15 and verse 16 there is a large narrative and experiential hole. ‘They set out from Rephidim and camped in the wilderness of Sinai and they set out from the wilderness of Sinai and camped at Kivroth-Hattavah’ (33: 15-16).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The whole purpose of the Exodus, the whole focus of Israelite history, was not just to free a group of slaves and give them a place of their own in the sun, but to give them a vision and a purpose – to enact a moral and ethical and cultural and social way of being, inspired by principles of justice and compassion. They were to be a people with a spiritual destiny, a collective mission, to bring a blessing to humanity, to be a blessing. This is what the revelation at Sinai was about: Torah, teaching, a way of life, a purpose to be lived out, striven for, from generation to generation. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And what do we hear about it in this detailed listing of the desert journeying? ‘They set out from Rephidim and camped in the wilderness of Sinai and they set out from the wilderness of Sinai and camped at Kivroth-Hattavah’. Nothing. Not a murmur. Silence. How come? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I couldn’t find a single traditional commentator who questions this, or even comments on it. Even the great medieval commentator Rashi is silent. Modern commentators sometimes note it but have almost nothing to say about it: the doyen of Biblical scholars Robert Alter acknowledges it, saying it is ‘surprising’ (‘The Five Books of Moses’, p.853) – but he doesn’t offer any insight into why it isn’t mentioned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The commentary in the American Conservative Movement’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Etz Hayim </i>chumash offers this considered view (p.955): ‘The narrative omits the war with Amalek at Rephidim as well as the manna at Sin, the revelation at Sinai, and other notable events of the wilderness trek. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">These events were so well known that they did not need to be repeated</i>’ (my italics added). Are we prepared to be satisfied by that? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>The American Reform Torah commentary says something almost identical: ‘Perhaps these events were so well known they did not need a special note’(p.1234). Not just inelegantly phrased but, along with the Conservative version, one of the weakest so-called ‘explanations’ you will ever hear for such a significant puzzle in the Torah. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We need to keep this question alive. Why is the revelation at Sinai passed over in silence? As if it hadn’t happened. As if it is a secret wound. As if it were better to avert one’s gaze. As if there is nothing to be said. As if there’s nothing to be done. As if darkness were preferable to light. As if silence was more comforting that knowledge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As if what is essential must remain invisible to the eye. As if the heart knows something that the mind represses, refuses to grasp.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><em>As if revelation is too painful. As if the word of God cannot be borne. As if Torah is trauma.</em> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry" title="Antoine de Saint-Exupéry"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Antoine de Saint-Exupéry</span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> disappeared over the Mediterranean in July 1944. I said earlier that he was probably shot down, by the Luftwaffe, but nobody knows for certain. He just disappeared, his body was never found. Fifty four years later, in September 1998, a fisherman found a silver identity bracelet off the coast of Marseille, bearing the name of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry" title="Antoine de Saint-Exupéry"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Saint-Exupéry</span></span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> and his wife. Puzzlingly, it was far from his intended flight path. Two years later, parts of his plane were discovered on the sea-bed nearby and three years later the French government allowed the plane’s remnants to be recovered and put on display.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But what actually happened to this aviator-storyteller nobody knows, or will ever know. What we have, and can know, are his words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>His mysterious death exemplifies those tantalizing words : </span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">"One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eyes." </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will never know about the mystery of Sinai. What happened. Whether anything happened. Whether the silence of Numbers 33 contains a profound truth about an event that exists only in words, in story, in the heart of the Jewish people. As if it were a dream, where we see clearly, but on awakening realize that what we have seen cannot bear the light of day. That we cannot bear it in the light of day.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Something was revealed - and our lives depend on it. Something was revealed, invisible to the eyes, and we go on speaking about it - though it is lost forever. The Torah - like the identity-bracelet, like the relics of a crashed plane - is all we have left, as an </span></span><b><span lang="EN" style="color: #292929; display: none; font-family: &quot;Arial&quot;,&quot;sans-serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-hide: all;">aide-mémoire</span></b><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">aide-</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">mémoire</span></i><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">. The Torah reminds us: something can be too painful, or awesome, to keep in mind. For better, or worse, "What is essential is invisible to the eyes." <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, August 6<sup>th</sup>, 2016]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-31373457813512710812016-06-25T19:28:00.000+01:002016-06-25T19:28:28.197+01:00Brexit: - and 40 years in the wilderness <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Friday morning, when I woke up and looked outside, it was a beautiful morning: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>the deluge of Thursday’s rain-storms had passed, and there was a luminous soft blue summer sky, and birdsong and a warmth in the air. And on any other day I might have experienced this with gratitude, as a blessing; on any other day I might have turned over in my mind the words of our greatest writer, the words put into John of Gaunt’s mouth in Richard II:</span></span><br /><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">“This happy breed of men, this little world/This precious stone set in the silver sea...Against the envy of less happy lands,/ This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">On any other day I would have ignored the propaganda encoded in the patriotism of the speech and just appreciated the beauty of the language mirroring the beauty of the day and the feeling of it being good to be alive, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘Now and in England.</i>’ [T.S.Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets]. But Friday was not any other day. On Friday, when I woke and had the overnight news confirmed, I just felt sick at heart – a mixture of upset and anger and bitterness and (if truth be told) more than a smattering of contempt for the Brexiters, who in my mind are represented (in their crudest incarnation) by those tanked-up English football fans who have been going round France this month singing (to the tune of 10 Green Bottles) about ‘Ten German bombers’ shot down by heroic British pilots, followed by the chant ‘Fuck off Europe, we’re all voting out’. (Never mind the irony that over 10% of the pilots fighting in the Battle of Britain were Polish or Czech – historical amnesia has been entrenched in this Referendum campaign.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I’m not proud of my class-based disdain – but I recognise it within that swirling mix of feelings from Friday morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Contempt and disdain is a way we all have of dealing with indigestible painful feelings. And part of the pain I was feeling was, I suppose, the pain of loss – the loss of a particular vision of a European identity and culture that I value, and that I value the UK being part of. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Maybe the lines that I needed to express this pain and sadness and sense of loss were those also put by Shakespeare into John of Gaunt’s mouth: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”</i></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I do feel a deep sorrow about ‘The Road Not Taken’ – like in Robert Frost’s poem from 1916, we as a nation will never come back to that fork in the road, this historical moment in 2016 when ‘two roads diverged in a wood’; we won’t now be able to take a different route from the populist-driven road that we have been marched into - towards who knows what for us, and our children, and our children’s children?</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This isn’t just sorrow for myself, it’s a deep sadness for our young people, who voted overwhelmingly for Remain – apparently more than 75% of 18-25s. They knew better than to succumb to bigotry – the antipathy to foreigners , those on the Continent or those living amongst us. They knew what the best voices in our culture knew and always have known, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”</i> [John Donne, ‘Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’, 1624]. That’s a small-c ‘continent’ that Donne is writing about. But the resonance of his imagery transcends time and space and speaks to us now – as our young people appreciated when they voted. The fantasy of a self-contained, self-sufficient existence, separated from others <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>is just that, a fantasy. John Donne knew that as both an MP and a clergyman (he was Dean of St.Paul’s). </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We woke up on Friday a divided kingdom, a very dis-United Kingdom. And the challenge now - a challenge for politicians, for all sectors of the community, including religious communities - is to ensure that the ethos of John Donne’s lines is heeded: we need to nurture the spirit and culture of human connection, and inter-connection, to hold to our better selves in order to keep the toxic forces of nationalism and racism at bay. Those powerful, regressive forces of hatred and aggression that led to the tragic death of John Donne’s successor as an MP, Jo Cox, have been unleashed in this campaign – and when they are mixed up with nostalgia for a mythic past, the wished-for return of a non-existent past, well, these forces of un-reason can turn a people very ugly indeed. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You don’t have to look further than our Torah portion this week (Numbers 13-14) to see this illustrated. It’s a strange co-incidence that this week’s sedrah <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>contains so many of the themes that we are seeing enacted around us. But then, as the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “co-incidence is not a kosher word” – from a Jewish perspective certain events can be seen to come together in inherently meaningful ways. They are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘beshert’ -&nbsp;</i>the Yiddish word best expresses it - ‘meant to be’. I am not saying (of course) that Brexit was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beshert</i>, but that the vote this week resonates with our own Jewish story in&nbsp;uncomfortable and disturbing ways.&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">We saw in our text how a national group, the Children of Israel, when faced with the uncertainties of a long journey to a promised land, become filled with fear by the reports of the 10 spies. Even though the spies bring back grapes and pomegranates and figs (it’s like loading up your car with French wine and cheeses to enjoy at home), and they acknowledge that the place is “flowing with milk and honey” (Numbers 13:27) – this is how it’s been advertised to them ,and the analogy would be to&nbsp;a travel brochure for a Continental holiday - they then proceed to offer an exaggerated account about the </span><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">terrible foreigners who live there: how crowded it is,&nbsp;how powerful they seem (like Brussels), and then the spies drop into their account a mention of&nbsp;the old enemy Amalek, whom the Israelites have already done battle with (they play the role&nbsp;in the nBiblical arrative that historically Germany has done in our national post-War narrative).&nbsp; </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And as soon as Caleb steps forward and offers another view, a more positive view, he’s shouted down and the mood turns ugly. The text says that the no-sayers then conjure up a deliberately malicious report – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dibat ha-aretz</i> (13:32), the Hebrew word means ‘defamatory’: the land “eats up its inhabitants” – it’s how the Brexiters talked about the Greeks consumed by debts, the European banks eating them up. The people are of “great stature” – like that dragon woman Mrs Merkel. “And we caught sight of those ancient giants the Nephilim, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bnei Anak</i>’ (13:33) : this is a classic tactic - scare the people with pictures of being overwhelmed by old enemies: in the Brexit campaign this role was&nbsp; assigned to&nbsp;the Turks. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It’s brilliantly-composed archetypal propaganda that the Biblical narrators offer us - put into the mouths of the 10 spies. And then the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coup de grace</i> – if we are allowed to use a French expression now in good old England – “we seemed in our own eyes to be like grasshoppers, and that’s how they saw us.” (13:33). The spies’ Project Fear is complete. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And it works. The people are terrified. They think: why would we want to go there? Why would we want to join up with them? And the ancient tropes – “our wives and children would become prey”, they say (14:3) – are just those we heard from that grinning buffoon Farage with his scaremongering about rapists and murderers having free access to our shores. And the solution to such fear – then and now – is the retreat into a nostalgia for the good old days – “let’s go back to Egypt” (14:3). “Let us find a leader and let us return to the land we knew – Egypt” (14:4). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Give us back our country</i>. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The tragedy for the children of Israel is that this response seals the fate of that generation. God recognises that they are still slaves in their hearts: they have a slave mentality even though they have been liberated from the house of slavery. Brexiters were enslaved by the lies and half-truths of Farage and Johnson and the Daily Mail and the Daily Express - and we are all the poorer because of it. In the Biblical account that whole generation have to die out before a more hope-filled generation can take over: the generation of Joshua and Caleb. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the Biblical&nbsp;text we are in the second year&nbsp;of what turns out to be a 40 year wandering in the wilderness. We think these numbers are mythic – and they are. But there are moments that transcend time when the wisdom of the past pierces the pretensions and illusions of today. This week, after this vote, I sense the resonance and power of that 40 years. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">We were in the EU for 40 years – and, in spite of its limitations, we gained more from it than most people ever realised. And now we are out of it, and having to start again - and it may take another 40 years to recover from what we have just done. It’s going to be, I fear, a long and painful journey, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bamidbar</i>, in the wilderness. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">“That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”</span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, June 25<sup>th</sup> 2016]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-9050129277125581232016-06-12T19:10:00.001+01:002016-06-12T19:10:55.424+01:00Saying Yes to Europe <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Who is in? And who is out? Who remains – and who leaves? Who belongs – and who doesn’t belong? Who is included – and who is excluded: thrust ‘outside the camp’, so to speak?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mi’chutz la’machane</i> (Numbers 5: 3-4). Every group, every tribe, every community, every nation – throughout history<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>– asks this question, seems to need to ask this question, from time to time. It’s fundamental<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>to how groups experience themselves: the very identity of the group is seen to be at stake in this question:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>are you part of ‘us’? or are you part of ‘them’? </span></span><br /><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about the identity of religious groups, political groups, family groups, social or cultural groups, ethnic groups, national groups, international groups – the same core questions keep arising: Who is in? And who is out? Who remains – and who has to leave, or wants to leave?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And once you start asking this set of questions you realise that there’s another set of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>questions fused to them: it isn’t just who is in and who is out. It’s who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">decides</i>who is in and who is out, who decides who remains and who leaves? And also: who makes up the rules in the first place? and who administers the rules, who polices the rules? So issues about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">identity</i>are fused with issues about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">authority</i>. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In Judaism, traditionally, rabbis decided who belonged and who couldn’t belong. It was through the maternal line; or through a conversion process and a Beth Din. And it wasn’t too complicated. In Britain nowadays, there are complex government procedures to determine who is a British citizen and who can’t have a British passport. Every group – from synagogues to golf clubs to nation states – has their rules as to who is allowed to belong and who is defined as ‘not one of us’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Of course in Judaism, what for 1800 years was a straightforward question about belonging has in the recent past become much more problematic . Because now the old question of defining who is a Jew has been replaced by the question ‘Who is a rabbi?’ – who has the authority to decide who is in and who is out? Is it Orthodoxy, or Reform, or the Chief Rabbinate in Israel? And is that the Ashkenazi rabbinate or the Sephardi rabbinate? Whether you belong or don’t belong to any club is all about the authority of who is doing the asking and who makes up the rules, and who polices the rules. This is how questions of identity and questions of authority become fused. And confused.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This week we read in the Torah a rather simplified picture about this question of belonging or not belonging.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As the people of Israel start off on their great journey through the desert, with the Sanctuary in their midst, certain people are set apart: they aren’t left behind, but they aren’t allowed to remain in the body of the community, they are judged to be blemished, or tainted in some way – temporarily – and are excluded. Those with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>indecorous, anxiety-producing skin-conditions, and those in recent contact with a corpse (Numbers 5:2) – they are excluded.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And who decides this? Who has the authority over this, and administers the system?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>It’s the priests, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cohanim</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The symbolic purity of the group – those who belong, those who are part of ‘us’ – can only be maintained by having a group who are not ‘us’, who have to be quarantined as ‘other’ than us. It’s as though if ‘we’ and ‘they’ were allowed to rub shoulders together, as it were, something nasty might happen. It’d not just be confusing, but dangerous. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You can see a fantasy in play that something would happen to the community’s sense of itself if ‘we’ and ‘they’ got mixed up together. In any group, mixing too freely with those thought of as ‘other’ - and managing the differences that arise - is often seen to be too threatening : either to our inner sense of who we are, or who our group is, or our country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The moral, or material, well-being of our group is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">felt</i>to be at risk; or our physical health; or our ‘cultural’ health. Sometimes it’s our very freedom that is felt to be at stake – or our ‘sovereignty’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You can tell what I am pre-occupied with at the moment. Rumour has it that a rather big question about our country’s future is on the horizon. As we drift towards this fateful day when we will decide whether to remain or to leave the European Union, the seas are quite choppy, turbulent. These are not calm waters we are floating in. Some people in the boat are struggling to row us in to the shore – and others are just as furiously trying to keep us from, as they see it, crashing onto the rocks. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Closeness – or distance: which do we want? We know that beyond Europe there are storms brewing, the global weather is unsettled in unprecedented ways - and I’m talking economic uncertainty and political upheavals as well as environmentally<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>-<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>and the question is: are we going to be safer in the harbour next to the shore – or safer further removed, adrift from the mainland. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It probably won’t surprise you that I am going to vote Remain. There are many reasons for this but I want here to say something of how my Yes is informed by my understanding of Judaism, and Jewish values. You might not think that this is a decision in which Jewishness makes any difference to your vote<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>- but I do think there is a Jewish perspective on the referendum. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">For me, it consists of two parts. The first is historical, the second is ethical -though the two parts intersect, as they often do in Judaism. If you are Jewish and reading this I’d imagine that most of you have your roots in Europe, one, two, three, four generations ago: Central or Eastern Europe, or what are now the Baltic States, or Western Europe (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain) – this is where our roots are, historically. And although Europe has been the home of longstanding anti-Semitism against Jews – which is possibly why our predecessors left their countries of origin and sought a new life in this country – European Jews have always had a sense of belonging to a trans-national community. They were loyal citizens of their host community but aware of a larger identity, and the strength that comes from a larger identity of belonging. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">You could go into any synagogue in any country of Europe, wherever the borders were and however often those borders changed over the centuries, and you would find a home, be at home. You were at home in the community as a Jew, you were at home in the texts, you were at home in the liturgy, you were at home in a shared identity, a shared history, a shared set of values that did not depend on nationality, but on your trans-national identity as Jew. You could open your page of Talmud in any community you visited and there was the same text: and side by side on the page - the design of which was laid out in Venice - was the Rashi commentary written in France, next to the Ibn Ezra commentary written in Spain, which nestles next to commentators from Vilna and Germany. The Talmud was a Euro-text centuries before the European Union was dreamed up. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This is just one way in which Ashkenazi Jews are historically, in their bones, in their souls, part of a wider European consciousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>We in the Reform movement have inherited that European identity in our liturgy – open the pages of the Shabbat prayer book, or the High Holy Day prayer book, and you find representatives of almost every European country past and present in its pages and in its anthologies: Franz Kafka from Prague sits next to Freud and Herzl from Vienna, next to Germany’s Moses Mendelssohn and Glueckel of Hameln, and the UK’s Louis Jacobs and the eastern European Hasidic masters rub shoulders with Spain’s Judah Ha-Levi. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jews were originally known as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ivrim</i> – Hebrews: the word, just to remind you, is from the verb ‘to cross over’, to cross boundaries, ‘to migrate’. Jews are those who live in countries with boundaries but know no boundaries in their hearts. Proud in the sovereignty of our separate identity we diasporic Jews glory in the way in which that identity is not limited by nationality: we know that to belong to something larger, more collective, something that transcends the insular, is a source of strength not something to fear. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Take the example of the Rothschild family: </span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">since the 1760s, when Mayer Amschel Rothschild established his banking business in Germany and through his five sons instituted a revolutionary international banking system embracing London, Paris, Naples, Frankfurt<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>and Vienna, diaspora Jews have recognized the economic, social and political limitations of nationalism. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All of this is second nature to Jewish self-perception, all of the above is part of the historical case for saying Yes as a Jew to Europe – it’s historical, it’s spiritual, it’s psychological, all together. It’s ingrained in our heritage. This is where we belong. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">And that’s leaving aside the more obvious historical rationale: that 70 years ago, from the midst of the rubble and ruin and wretchedness of a devastated continent, a grand vision arose: to </span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">''<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">make war unthinkable and materially impossible''. Nationalism had proved a dead end, literally and metaphorically. The dream of a supra-national union of states based on close economic ties and treaties was born. It was an extraordinary and moving vision of a way of living together peacefully with our differences. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I feel blessed that I am part of a generation - and have seen the next two generations grow up – freed from the terrible burden of war. After the bloodshed of the 20<sup>th</sup> century it is no small thing that the European Union has ensured that no blood has been spilled between its members. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Nobody has had to die because of ancient or nationalistic hatreds. If Yugoslavia had been part of the European Union twenty-five years ago we would not have had a Bosnian war with all its suffering. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And it’s not part of so-called ‘Project Fear’ to recognise that the breakup of the European Union becomes more likely if the UK leaves than if it stays. To say nothing of the breakup of the UK itself. If someone is wanting to jump off a cliff and their friend described the consequences of doing that, you wouldn’t respond: ‘Oh you’re just trying to frighten them!’ </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">God knows, there are multiple ways in which the EU is a flawed arrangement -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>but informed scepticism about the limitations of this complex<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>transnational project can be combined with a commitment to adhering to the vision that inspired its founders. Are we really as a nation going to cut ourselves adrift from the protections that accrue from belonging to this club – of human rights, employment rights and the rest – along with the benefits of trans-national co-operation on terrorism, the environment, scientific research, cultural projects, and so on? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Maybe we are. Maybe the anti-establishment rage that is fuelling American politics, channeled through Donald Trump, will win the day here. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The UK is simmering with anger and frustration: social grievances that successive governments here have failed to address are leading to much bitterness over the lack of affordable housing, the decline in secure jobs, and underfunded public services (the NHS and mental health services, schools, social care for the elderly, the disabled). And in relation to all of these grievances, symptoms of a felt sense of deprivation, or a decline in the quality of living – <i>there isn’t<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a single one of them that can’t be blamed on immigrants</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And this is where , from a Jewish perspective, history and ethics/moral values, intersect. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Swirling around Europe, with a toxicity that has become part of this Referendum debate here, are strands of xenophobia. It is most obvious in France and Hungary and Austria and Denmark - but that anger against immigrants is being stoked up here too. And a Jewish contribution to this debate is to call out the fraudulence of this. We Jews who have eyes thousands of years old and know how minority groups can become the scapegoats for social ills, the victims for prejudices and hatreds which have nothing to do with them, and everything to do with governments who fail to care for the well-being of poor and rich alike, we Jews have the experience and the insight to see it when it is happening. And it is happening in this Referendum debate. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Issues to do with immigration have become a very convenient framework narrative to speak about economic and social insecurities. It’s the prism through which Farage and the Daily Mail (amongst others) see everything. People’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>insecurities are real – and need to be addressed – but blaming immigrants for them is morally suspect, and thinking you can protect yourself from these insecurities by isolating yourself<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>from the rest of Europe is just deluded thinking. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But once this virus of prejudice is released in a society and legitimized as just another aspect of a national debate, it won’t just go away - whichever way the vote goes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The ancient Hebrews had rams they could sacrifice, to gain atonement for wrongdoing committed against fellow human beings (Numbers 5: 8). We as a society no longer have the rituals to atone for such wrongs. We have different collective rituals – voting is one of them – but whichever way this vote does go, it won’t deal with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>the ‘sins’ this Referendum campaign has unleashed. And we are all impoverished by that. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">[loose</span></b></span><b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">ly based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, June 11th 2016] </span></b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"> **********************************************************************</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span>&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: small;">Postscript</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">On Shavuot, the symbolic commemoration of the giving of the 10 Commandments, here are 10 reasons&nbsp;to say Yes to Europe.:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Certain problems and threats we face as a country can only be addressed through working closely with others: </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">1) climate change and the collapse of eco-systems </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">2) terrorism </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">3) health issues to do with epidemics, smoking, obesity, diabetes, alcohol, air pollution </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">4)antibiotic resistance research </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">5) limiting the power of transnational corporations to further enlarge the gap between rich and poor </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">6) The humanitarian crisis concerning refugees in Europe can’t be addressed by closing our borders </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">7) Objective views of the economic benefits of remaining seem comprehensive</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">8) The protection of employment rights </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">9) The protection of human rights through the European Court of Human Rights </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">10) cultural and educational projects that depend on the free movement of European and UK citizens</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-80354388181104324442016-05-03T12:41:00.000+01:002016-05-03T22:17:43.439+01:00Did Hitler “support Zionism”? <span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">This week London is holding, for the fifth time, elections for the prestigious political job of Mayor of London.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Ken Livingstone won the first two of these elections: 2000 and 2004. A staunch left-winger, he stood twice more and was defeated on each occasion: 2008 and 2012. So this week is the first time he has not been involved, not been the intense focus of media and public attention and speculation. Except that he has found a way – the unconscious is such a devious vehicle for our hidden desires! – to ensure that he is still dominating the news. </span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;"></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">In<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a classic piece of unconscious attention-seeking he found himself on the radio defending Labour MP, Naz Shah, who had been suspended by the party for anti-Zionist remarks on social media (before she was a MP) that Israel should be “re-located” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>and their people “transported” to the United States. It would save the US money, you see. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">Now I don’t hold to the view that all anti-Zionist remarks are necessarily anti-semitic. By ‘anti-Zionist’ I mean: critical of, or antagonistic to, the policies and actions <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>- historically and in the present - of various governments of the State of Israel. But to my mind such anti-Zionist views shade into anti-semitism <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>when there is a wish to de-legitimise the very existence of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people: such a view makes Jews into the only people who are not permitted to have a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>self-determining existence as a nation state. Thus the rhetoric of anti-Zionism can hide, or mask, anti-semitism. And such hiding or masking of deeper-seated anti-semitic feelings (i.e. anti-Jewish feelings) can be consciously done - or it may not even be conscious for the one holding ‘anti-Zionist’ views. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">Naz Shah’s remarks are hard to defend as anything other than anti-semitic. Her use of the vocabulary of “transportation” is particularly chilling to Jewish ears. But Ken Livingstone, while admitting that her views were “over the top”, denied that Naz Shah was anti-semitic. This is actually an interesting test case as to what we mean by ‘anti-semitic’, for now that she is an MP, in Bradford, Ms. Shah apparently has very good relationships with the Jewish community. Can someone who can say, as it were and un-ironically, ‘some of my best friends are Jews’ still be anti-semitic? I suppose so, because while any of us might have warm individual relationships with other people we perceive as ‘other’ than us, we can still harbour prejudices and antipathies to whatever group they belong to; and that group could be an ethnic, sexual or national group. This is part of what it means to be human – to be contradictory, to be a composite of different, sometimes mutually opposing, views and feelings and impulses. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">Part of the difficulty of discussing these issues of anti-semitism and anti-Zionism is that acknowledgement of the unconscious, and the tendency for all of us to be holding within us contradictory views and feelings, rarely figures as part of our public conversation. Psychological complexity goes by the board as everything is reduced to simplicities and essentialist formulations like ‘she’s an antisemite’, ‘he’s a monster’, ‘they are crazy’. But things – and people – are rarely that black and white. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">Let me return to Ken Livingstone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>After defending Naz Shah, he seemed to become bewitched by his own rhetoric and proceeded to utter remarks that have stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy - and have led to his own suspension (not for the first time) from the Labour party. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Let’s remember”, </i>he said,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews”. </i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">Livingstone has subsequently defended these gratuitous remarks as “historical fact”. Which is bizarre, given that each of the separate parts of that sentence - other than the last phrase - is incorrect. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">Let’s start with Hitler’s so-called ‘election’: there were in fact four major elections in Germany in 1932, none of which Hitler ‘won’ – there were 2 rounds of Presidential elections, in both of which Hitler was defeated by Paul von Hindenburg; in the Federal election of July 1932, the Nazi party gained more seats than other parties but didn’t have a majority, leading to a minority government led by Franz von Papen; in the Federal election of November 1932, the Nazi party saw a significant drop in both votes and seats. So Hitler never won an election in 1932. In January 1933 the weakened 84-year old President von Hindenburg made Adolf Hitler Chancellor. Following a systemic campaign of terror and suppression directed at other political parties, particularly the communists, Hitler then ‘won’ 43% of the vote in the subsequent March 1933 Federal election - which still necessitated a coalition in order to rule.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">Secondly, the statement that Hitler believed that “Jews should be moved to Israel” might be Livingstone’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>shorthand way of speaking, but is of course a historical absurdity as even he must know: Israel did not come into being until – following the UN’s Partition Plan for Palestine of November 1947 (Resolution 181) - the State of Israel was declared on 14<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> May, 1948.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">But of course most controversial of all – a piece of polemic that he must have known would engage and enrage his audience (which these days, with 24/7 news, includes us all) – is the statement that Hitler “was supporting Zionism”. What on earth does Livingstone think is the “historical fact” behind that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>As he hasn’t said, I can only surmise.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>If you do a bit of digging in the history books you can read about the so-called ‘Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement’ signed between Nazi Germany and the Zionist Federation of Germany on 25<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> August 1933. This was designed to facilitate the transfer of German Jews to Palestine. German Jews gave up their possessions to the government before departing for Palestine, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>having paid the equivalent of £1000 into the Anglo-Palestine Bank (which was under the direction of the Jewish Agency in Palestine).This money which could then be used to buy back their goods and have them transferred to Palestine as German export goods. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">This agreement was, inevitably, controversial at the time: it was criticised by many Jewish leaders, both in the Zionist movement and outside it, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and Hitler’s support of it seems unclear, veering from criticism at the beginning to support in the period 1937-9</i>. Is this what Livingstone means when he said that Hitler “was supporting Zionism”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>If so, then by Livingstone’s confused and devious logic, Donald Trump’s call for 11 million unregistered Mexicans to be returned – ‘transferred’ – back to Mexico could be described as evidence for him being a pro-Mexico patriot and supporter. Or as commentator Jonathan Freedland wrote in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guardian</i>in regard to Livingstone’s “garbled and insulting” version of history: it’s “as if there is any moral comparison between wishing to inflict mass expulsion on a minority and the desire to build a thriving society where that minority might live.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">Of course what underlies Livingstone’s bombastic and egregious comments is his wish to set up a moral comparison between Nazism and Israel (and its alleged ‘war crimes’). It could be argued that it is not overtly anti-semitic to make this comparison: I was shocked to read 25 years ago about the way in which soldiers in the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] routinely described their activities in the occupied territories by using - with bitter and self-knowing irony - Nazi vocabulary such as going out on an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aktion</i> (see Ari<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Shavit’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On Gaza Beach</i>, New York Review of Books, July 18<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup>, 1991). But Livingstone’s tarring of Israel with the brush of Nazism is a regular and depressing trope of ideologically-rigid leftist rhetoric as well as some strands of Islamist-inspired Muslim prejudice. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">What leads me to the last error in Livingstone’s polemical sentence. His belief that the murder of 6 million Jews happened because Hitler “went mad”. This betrays, sadly but significantly, a real blind-spot in Livingstone’s thinking. <em>For it was not a mental aberration that led to genocide</em>. It was the cold and calculated result of an ideology. The logic of Nazi Aryan ideology required the extinction of ‘inferior’ classes of people: Jews, the mentally handicapped, the disabled, and so on. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>(Too rigid belief-systems are forms of cruelty – the one who suffers may be the believer themselves, but more often someone else has to suffer). That Livingstone can’t see that it was the pernicious effects of an ideology that led to mass murder – and not one man’s mental derangement – is a reflection of his own lack of insight about the destructive nature of so much ideological political thinking, including his own. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">A final word. Livingstone’s reckless display of his own unconscious antisemitism may have damaged the chances of the Labour candidate for Mayor, the liberal Muslim Sadiq Khan, a decent man who has had to endure from some quarters a semi-racist and Islamophobic campaign against him. If it has, then Livingstone can enjoy his – what shall we call it? – perhaps <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">schadenfreude</i> is the necessary word in this context. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>If he can’t be London Mayor, no other Labour candidate can be allowed to. That remains to be seen. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , serif;">But what is clearer is that in the presence of Livingstone-like hostility to the Jewish State, inflected with stands of antisemitic discourse, it becomes harder for Jews to continue undauntedly to express their loving concern about Israel’s ongoing failure to correct the historic injustices of the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>nearly 50-year occupation of Palestinian lands, the systematic daily brutalisation of Palestinians that is a consequence of occupation, and their intransigence in relation to agreeing to a two-state solution and an independent Palestine. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Yet for Jews <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>the moral case for the existence of a Jewish State and the moral critique of the existing State will continue to go hand in hand. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia;">+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">For those who are interested&nbsp;in these issues </span><div style="display: inline;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">there is an interview with me available <span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">from BBC London’s Sunday morning ‘In Spirit’ programme. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">Go to : </span></div><br /><div><span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03s8mty" title="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03s8mty">http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03s8mty</a></span></div><br /><div><em>You can find it at 02:11:10 into the programme.&nbsp;</em></div><div><em>&nbsp;</em></div><div><em>This may not be available outside the UK</em></div><br /><div> </div></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-37040003433645313322016-04-17T17:12:00.000+01:002016-04-17T17:12:31.462+01:00Is Illness Linked to Moral Failings? <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">There is a well-known rabbinic saying about the Torah – in </span><i style="font-size: 14pt;">Pirkei Avot</i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> [‘The Ethics of the Fathers’] it’s credited to Hillel’s disciple, Ben Bag Bag from the 1</span><sup>st</sup><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> century – </span><i style="font-size: 14pt;">‘Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it’</i><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> (5:25). Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by ‘everything’.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">&nbsp; </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">You could think of a million things that aren’t in it, from the EU referendum to smart phones, from Mozart to Premier League football. So what he </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">seems to mean, Ben Bag Bag, must be something rather different.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Maybe what he was trying to say was something like this : whatever&nbsp; situation you face in life you can find it addressed in Torah, if you search long and hard enough. Family dynamics, between husbands and wives, or parents and children, or sibling relationships; social dynamics &nbsp;- how you structure a society in terms of justice and equality and relationships between people, both neighbours and strangers; how you deal with creating a moral framework for living, learning to distinguish between good and bad actions; how you deal with psychological dynamics: guilt, forgiveness, envy, jealousy, &nbsp;possessiveness, sexual desire, aggression...; how you deal with the structure of a life, one’s life cycle: birth, marriage, divorce, health and disease, ageing, death; how you form a collective identity as a people through festivals and celebrations and rituals, through singing and memorializing and story-telling. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">From this perspective, the Torah is a set of texts that in one way or another speak about ‘everything’ you might experience: from the foods you eat to the clothes you wear to the money you spend to the historical memories you retain. And if it doesn’t seem to cover it, what Ben Bag Bag is intimating is that those who study these texts, the rabbis, will turn the texts inside out, and upside down, and dig and dig until they, the rabbis, will discover whatever they need to address a real-life situation. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">He is suggesting that the text of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible as a whole is infinitely rich, and fertile - and our human ingenuity and creativity and imagination can make anything out of it, discover anything in it. The Torah becomes a kind of Rorschach test, a Rorschach text, where we will find in it whatever we want to find: we will see patterns and themes and ideas, we will see in it whatever we want to see, layer after layer of sacred truths. And although the rabbis of tradition would have said that they were discovering what was already implicitly there, we could also say that they were projecting onto the text their own contemporary views and values and needs.&nbsp;</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">But whichever way you see it, this has been the Jewish way, for two millennia, to turn it and turn it, and keep on discovering new everythings that are in it, or suggested by it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">So when the rabbinic commentators through the ages were faced with the chapters we read this week, <i>Metzorah</i> (Leviticus 14+15), they were quick to dig beneath the original, primary meaning of its opening verses – how to re-integrate into society someone who was temporarily afflicted with a physical skin condition that made them unfit to remain in the body of the community. They diverted their attention away from the literal meaning – not least because the institutional setting of the Temple with the priesthood and the offerings &nbsp;was no longer in existence, so the rituals described couldn’t be enacted in any case. The rabbis turned it into a text about something else - that appears to be quite different from outer skin conditions and fungus in houses. It became a text about malicious outbreaks of a different kind: gossip, slander, bad-mouthing others, talking in a hateful or destructive way. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">So how did they get from outer afflictions, discoloration – of skin, or fabrics, or houses, &nbsp;<i>metzorah</i>– to speech acts? First of all they looked at where else this word came in the Hebrew Bible and saw that it was used when Miriam spoke against her brother Moses (Numbers 12: 1-15) after which she suffered from <i>tzara’at; </i>and it is also used at the burning bush when Moses spoke ill of the Israelites by saying they wouldn’t believe him about God’s plans to redeem them, and his hand turned <i>metzora’at </i>and<i> </i>‘white as snow’(Exodus 4:6). We find the same Hebrew word (in different variations) in all these places. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">So with these precedents, the rabbis interpreted our <i>sedrah</i>’s texts as speaking not so much about adverse <i>physical </i>conditions that people or buildings might suffer, but about a <i>moral</i> issue - what people say: people expressing disparaging &nbsp;thoughts, off-colour thoughts, about other people. And they backed up this interpretation by pointing to a play on words, a pun, in the Hebrew. They saw that <i>metzorah </i>sounds like and looks like <i>motsi ra</i>, short for <i>motsi shem ra</i> (literally: ‘putting out a bad name’ – bad-mouthing, slander, defamation). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">So the link with slander is made on two levels – through looking at other texts where the word comes, and speaking badly about people is the context; and by using their own rabbinic theory of the plasticity of language: the words are there, they thought, to be read both literally and creatively - midrashically, imaginatively, homiletically.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;">&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">So the Torah text of <i>Metzorah</i> is turned over and dug into so that it could offer something of value that transcended its original setting and original meaning. It was made into something relevant for all times and all people and all settings: it was used to talk about <i>l’shon hara</i> – speaking ill of people. Because we can all relate to that: to the temptation, the impulse, the experience, of speaking badly about other people. And we can all relate, when we have done it, to the wish to find a way of recovering from it, dealing with the consequences of it, this kind of moral affliction. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The problem for us, now, is that we don’t have any rituals for this, or priests who help us – though people do go to their secular equivalents, therapists, to deal with the <i>feelings</i> that lead to this kind of stuff breaking out in us, or in our homes - outbreaks of verbal aggression (which is what gossip is, and slander, and other forms speaking abusively about others). We know how damaging this is on an individual level, when we do it, or when we are on the receiving end of it; how corrosive it is of good relationships, of trust, how it undermines the fabric of social relationships. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And we don’t have to look too far to see how destructive it is on a collective level, where we have no rituals to deal with outbreaks of <i>metzorah, motsi ra</i>: it spreads in a quite uncontained way and poisons public life and private life. The omnipresence of social media actively promotes unrestrained verbal aggression, trolling, hate speech. The tabloid press couldn’t exist without gossip and the denigration of individuals and groups. We have as a society a really profound problem with <i>metzorah, motsi ra</i>. And no rituals to contain it or help us recover from it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">What happens to our well-being as a society when individuals and groups are made into ‘lepers’ [the old translation], to be bad-mouthed and shunned? Immigrants, Muslims, Zionists, paedophiles, benefit claimants, old people, young people, politicians, trades unionists: any group can be demonised, any individual can be outed and abused, made into an outcast by a self-righteous group (or individual) who set themselves up as judge and jury. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Before we look down, with the vast condescension of posterity, on these ancient rituals and archaic beliefs that we think we are seeing in the Torah, and smile at how superior we are morally and intellectually to our ancestors, we just need to take a cool dispassionate look around us and wonder what the effects are, short-term&nbsp; and long-term, of living with, and colluding with, the <i>metzorah</i> that is part of our daily reality. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Yet there is one way, I think, in which we moderns might have an insight into something that our ancestors didn’t fully appreciate. You see, these Torah texts, and the later rabbinic commentaries on them, sometimes give the impression – when they connect issues about <i>physical</i> well-being, health and illness <i>with</i> moral issues and moral failings - that there’s a <i>cause and effect </i>relationship. Although it never says in our <i>Metzorah</i>chapters <i>why</i> a person or a house might be afflicted, once you start to link that condition with a moral failing like slander, an association is set up in our minds - and it is sometimes spelled out specifically this way by the rabbis - that the affliction is <i>caused by</i> the moral failing. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">But there is a big difference between saying that when you read text A it can make you think about theme B (you read about discoloration on skin or stones and you then link it imaginatively to bad-mouthing others) and saying ‘A is caused by B’. A might lead you to think about B, but that doesn’t mean ‘A happens because of B’ or ‘A is a punishment because of B’.&nbsp; And I’m saying this because one very common belief people have, ancient and modern, is that physical illnesses happen to us <i>because we are being punished</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Those brought up in a traditional religious framework – Catholics are almost as good at this as Jews – often believe that if they are ill, or something bad happens – that this is a punishment from God for something they have done wrong. And even if the belief doesn’t come in that religious form - ‘God is punishing me because I’m bad’ - there is a secular variant that takes God out of the picture but still says ‘I’m suffering this because I did that - and I shouldn’t have done that’: ‘I’ve got cancer because I cheated on my partner’. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I come across this a lot as both a rabbi and a therapist: the belief that suffering, physical or emotional, is a punishment. But, unlike the ancient texts and rabbis, &nbsp;I just don’t think the world works that way. Although I’m sure that’s how it <i>felt </i>to us when we were very small. Because when we are very small we are hard-wired to think of things as being about us: ‘Mummy’s in a bad mood because I’ve done something wrong. Daddy’s angry because I’m bad.’ When we are 3, 4, 5 years old we don’t think, we can’t think, ‘Mummy’s in a bad mood because she’s just lost her job. Daddy’s angry because he can’t find his mobile phone, or his team has just lost.’ &nbsp;What the child believes is that something is going wrong - they are being ignored or punished or told off - because it is something they have done wrong. And that way of thinking – bad things happen to me as punishments for my misdeeds, illness happens because I’m bad – persists into adulthood, in both religious and secular forms. And that kind of belief really doesn’t serve us well. It’s basically anti-life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">But I want to add a further twist to this theme about the relationship between physical ailments and moral failings. And this may sound paradoxical after what I have just said. Every day in my psychotherapy consulting room I find that <i>there is often a relationship</i> between our body’s state and our behaviour and emotions. But it isn’t anything to do with being punished. It’s about the ways in which our bodies and minds, our physical state&nbsp; and our emotional state, are completely inter-related. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">So – to take an example directly linked to our Torah portion - skin complaints:&nbsp; spots, boils, eczema, psoriasis, rashes, skin irritations of various kinds. These are often linked to what’s going on in our lives: &nbsp;what we are feeling, or not feeling; what stresses and emotions we are aware of, but can’t express; or we might not even be aware of a range of feelings, that are unconscious. Very often skin complaints are to do with anger, unexpressed feelings that are translated into a symptom. We might be aware of the anger, but we might not. Either way, that anger has nowhere to go <i>except into the body</i>, where it produces an outbreak of one kind or another. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And we talk about it this way in our everyday speech, as if we intuitively know what the problem is: we speak about an ‘angry rash’ without realising that yes, the rash is there because we are angry. (I’m simplifying here to make my point, things are often more complex than this). But what I do know is that physical ailments are very often connected to something else - something that we can’t manage in our lives, or emotions that we have no access to, or we are ashamed of, or we can’t find an outlet for: back pain, headaches, stiff necks, heartburn, constipation, sore throats - our bodies are a theatre in which the stresses and strains and emotional dramas and psychological problems of&nbsp; our lives are constantly played out. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Our Torah portion – and the rabbis who traditionally linked <i>Metzorah</i> to the envy and jealousy and fears in us that end up with us speaking ill of others – is intuiting a deep understanding that things are linked together in life in surprising and sometimes disconcerting ways. How we might long for a modern ritual as powerful as the ancient one to help us move on beyond our afflictions, our meanness of spirit, our spite, our tendency to make ‘lepers’ of others. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Consider the symbolism of the ritual. Two birds were taken, and one is killed. The blood is sprinkled on the afflicted person or building. The other bird is set free. Atonement is achieved. At-one-ment. The movement is from death to life. Something has to die, something has to be scattered, something has to be set free: that’s the process that leads to well-being. Don’t we need some modern rituals of transformation that can help us transform the destructive polemics of our lives and society into creative and life-giving forms of expression?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">‘<i>Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it’</i>. This ancient text from the much-maligned Book of Leviticus gives as a kind of route map, a &nbsp;symbolic pathway towards wholeness , to help us renew a sense of well-being in a society. Something has to die, to end; something has to be scattered, dispersed; something has to be released, set free. <i>Zot Torat Ha’za’ra’at</i> (Leviticus 14:57) – ‘this is the law concerning afflictions’: ‘this is the teaching concerning these deep ailments we suffer...’ <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I wonder what it is going to take before we really are ready to listen to this Torah, this teaching?&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><b>[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, April 16th, 2016]</b></span></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-2175737528939322742016-03-20T22:25:00.001+00:002016-03-20T22:25:33.377+00:00Thoughts on 'Coming of Age' and Jewish Values <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I don’t know how many of you know the Canadian film ‘The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz’? It was made in 1974 and based on the novel of the same name by the Jewish writer Mordechai Richler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span><o:p></o:p></span></span><br /> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Duddy Kravitz - played by a young Richard Dreyfuss in the film - is a young man desperate to make some money quickly. He decides that making films of Bar Mitzvahs would be easy money: after all, there’s an endless supply of ceremonies and everyone would want a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>record of the special day. The only problem is he doesn’t actually know how to make a film. Of course these days it wouldn’t be a problem because anyone can buy a hand-held digital camera and be their own Steven Spielberg. But this is 1974. So our hero recruits an elderly, eccentric English film-maker, who is permanently drunk, and asks <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">him</i> to make a film of the Bar Mitzvah of a distant relative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>What Duddy hasn’t realised is just how eccentric this Englishman is - not just in his life but in his style of filmmaking. He’s what used to be called avant-garde. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So, the film is made and it’s eventually screened in front of an excited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>audience of the whole Bar Mitzvah family, their friends and invited guests. The Englishman’s film begins conventionally enough – inside the synagogue, Torah scrolls, ark, bimah – but the music is odd, it’s Beethoven’s Fifth, and that’s a prelude to what’s to come. The film cuts to a circumcision ceremony, blood splatters the screen, then Zulu warriors appear in full tribal regalia and scenes of Zulu ceremonial rites are intercut with scenes from the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Watching this, the Bar Mitzvah boy’s father, cigar hanging out of his increasingly incredulous mouth, turns to the rabbi, who’s also been invited to the screening, and mutters: ‘That’s not what I saw in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shul</i>, [in the synagogue]’. And the Bar Mitzvah film comes to a dramatic climax with scenes of guests greedily stuffing their faces with food at the Bar Mitzvah party intercut with an Indian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fakir</i>in a loincloth swallowing down razor blades. The credits come up and there’s a stunned, embarrassed silence. Eventually the rabbi saves the day: ‘A most edifying experience’, he says hesitantly, ‘a work of art’. The boy’s father beams with delight. ‘See how nice you looked’, he says to the rabbi. And acknowledging the gathering applause of the guests he adds: ‘It costs plenty...don’t worry...it’s all paid for...’ </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Of course <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>- I hasten to add - Mordecai Richler’s wickedly funny parody of North American Jewish life 40 and more years ago bears no resemblance to the integrity and down-to-earth modesty with which our own Bar and Bat Mitzvah families celebrate these occasions. And yet, on another level, ‘Duddy Kravitz’ does have something interesting to say about the power adhering to the Bar Mitzvah rite of passage. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Because what Richler is acknowledging in his sly and provocative book, and what the film also points towards, is the tribal nature of Jewishness and Jewish identity; and the way in which these ceremonies are about young people taking their place as young adults inside the tribe, the culture, the traditions. Our youngsters say, by having some kind of ceremony in the synagogue to mark this transition into their teenage years, ‘I want to be part of something bigger than me called Jewish life, Jewish community, Jewish tradition. I want to acknowledge that I am one link in a chain, a chain that stretches back many generations, one more link in a chain that actually stretches back more than 2000 years. That chain has never broken, it’s never been broken – however hard sometimes the world has tried to break it – and today, as I move into my teenage years, I want to add my link to this chain: for another generation, for my generation, I am part of this tribe’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">That’s what having a Bar Mitzvah symbolises. Our youngsters think of it as a ‘coming of age’ ceremony - but it isn’t only about growing up, it’s about taking <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">responsibility </i>as one grows up for what one believes in, what one is committed to. And part of that commitment is a commitment to continuity...</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jews historically have paid a lot of attention to the story of where they have come from, and what has happened to them. The history and memory of what the tribe has been through, and what the customs and traditions of the tribe have been, runs like a golden thread through the tapestry of each Jewish person’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>identity. For Jews the past is always woven into the present. That’s why we always go back to the original stories and texts of the tradition – it’s what the Torah is: a great fund of stories and myths and memories and images and symbols and rituals and laws which have kept the tribe going for two and a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>half thousand years. That’s why the Torah, in one form or another, is the symbolic centre of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Jewish tradition developed an elegant metaphorical image for the Torah: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>it was called the ‘Tree of Life’ – because its roots go very deep, back in time, and because its branches spread out and blossom generation after generation. And each child who becomes Bar or Bat Mitzvah is like a new blossom on the Tree of Life.&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But Judaism isn’t only about the history and memory of the tribe. The Torah is also called the Tree of Life because it’s about what promotes life, the sanctity of life, the dignity of human beings - including the dignity of other human beings who are not like us, who might belong to different tribes, different cultures. Over and over again it promotes certain values, moral values, regarding the importance of care and concern and compassion for the outsiders in society, for the strangers, for the dispossessed, for the marginalised. Judaism’s horizon of care stretches beyond ‘us’ to embrace ‘them’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">More than 2000 years ago, the tribe of Israel, who grew into the Jewish people, developed a way of thinking about what values in life are important, what values are life-giving, what values are worth promoting and speaking about and living out day by day; and they wrote these values down in this unique document we call the Torah, and they said (as it were) ‘we haven’t just invented this way of thinking about living and what’s important if societies are to function well and people thrive in them, we have not just made this up out of our own heads, we have been guided to this, we have been given this wisdom, this knowledge, this understanding - we think there is some universal energy, some force, which has let us understand how to be human, fully human, and how people should live and treat each other. We call this energy, this force, God – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adonai</i>, in Hebrew – which means the Eternal. Because we realise that certain values – justice and compassion and kindness and generosity - are eternal. They are good for all time and for all people’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Judaism developed this original vision and of course it was then passed on into Christianity and Islam and adopted and adapted by these other great religions...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I wouldn’t want to be 13 again (there’s no chance of that, I know, but still...): our Bar and Bar Mitzvah youngsters <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>are part of a generation in this country who are facing really difficult things in their lives as they are growing into adulthood. They are facing huge stresses at school, sometimes at home, stresses to achieve, and to look good; stresses in relation to bullying, stresses that lead to self-harming, and depression, stresses that have placed UK teenagers almost at the bottom of the World Health Organisation’s survey published this week about the happiness levels of youngsters in the 40 most economically well-off countries round the world. And that’s not all. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our young people are being subjected in this country to a whole range of attacks on their future<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>well-being. They are facing huge debts if they go to university. Youth services are being decimated around the country. There’s a discriminatory minimum wage if they get a part-time job. There are cuts to social security.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>They are concerned about whether<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>they will ever be able to get a secure, well-paid job. They don’t know if they will they ever be able to afford their own home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And they may well think – and even if they are generous enough not to think it, I think it – that my<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>generation and their parents’ generation have really screwed things up for their generation: economically, socially, environmentally, collectively as a society we have failed, and we continue to fail, to put the well-being of everybody before the well-being of a few.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>That’s what used to be called a ‘sin’ – but of course nobody calls it that anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They see that we are faced as a society with a huge choice: it’s a political choice, and a moral choice, and a spiritual choice. Do you retreat from the world, or do you stay open to the wider world? Do you withdraw into your own tribe, or nation, and just try and look after your own – or do you stay connected with others in different tribes, cultures, countries? Do you try to look out for the interests of people like yourself – your class, your background, your education, your ethnic culture – or do you look out for the interests of others not like you? Do you build a wall to try and keep others out, and think you can manage on your own and live securely by turning inwards? Or do you recognise that we are all inter-connected and so work to ensure that your generosity and care and sense of justice reaches out to embrace others? </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">There are plenty of voices around, in this country – you can see it every day in the popular press – and in the rest of Europe, in Israel, in America, that are appealing to, arguing for, a narrowing down of our humane values, appealing to the tribal, the nationalistic, the fearful parts of ourselves. It’s not surprising that so many youngsters are cynical about what the so-called ‘adult’ world is doing. It’s not surprising that more than 80% of 18 year olds have a negative view of politics and politicians, and 66% feel that the government in this country isn’t trustworthy. When you are faced by a barrage of attacks on aspects of your well-being in life, and your generosity and idealism is derided as naive or unrealistic, it’s not surprising if you begin to think that injustice is inevitable, it’s easy to become resigned to feeling that you can’t make much difference... </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But what impresses me about so many of the young people who have a Bar or Bar Mitzvah in this community is their belief that on a personal level acts of kindness and generosity do make a difference, they change how people feel. And they are more than aware that on a collective level you can learn from your history that the values lived out in a society are hugely significant: that great good can be promoted, that make societies function well and the people in them thrive; and great evil can be enacted that leads to hardship or persecution, and sometimes to death. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">None of this is very new, none of this is revelatory, but what our Jewish tradition does is it keeps on reminding us about what matters. It keeps on reminding us through its texts and stories and traditions - because we can lose sight of what matters, it’s easy to do in the busy-ness and business of the world - <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Jewish teaching keeps on reminding us: kindness, concern for others, care for the environment, a passion for justice, generosity of the heart and the spirit -this is what matters. The world depends on it. Each of us depends on it.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">What our youngsters commit themselves to, as they go through the tribal rite of passage called Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah, is to keep that ancient vision alive, as best they can...<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[Extracted and adapted from a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, March 19<sup>th</sup>, 2016]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-44116011501894889202016-02-24T14:17:00.000+00:002016-02-24T14:17:16.608+00:00There Will Be Blood<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I’ve never been a very ideologically-minded Reform Jew. I have never seen myself as a ‘salesman’ for the Reform brand of Jewish self-expression. I think of Judaism as a three thousand years old religious and cultural civilisation, a rich and multi-coloured tapestry of belief and practice with complex theological and intellectual and emotional and spiritual threads woven into it: the ideology of Reform Judaism, progressive Judaism, might be a distinctive set of threads in the overall, ever-expanding weave of Jewish civilisation, but temperamentally I don’t feel myself motivated to keep pointing out the softness and sparkle of the red threads as opposed to the coarseness or dullness of the blue threads.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">But this week I have been thinking in particular about Reform Judaism’s relationship to blood. I saw that a motion was put forward to the Church of England’s synod to make blood donation (and organ donation) a specific responsibility incumbent on all Christians - &nbsp;a ‘mitzvah’<i> </i>so to speak.&nbsp; Given that only 4% of the population give blood regularly and the NHS need another 200,000 donors a year, this is an important move by the Church, if they are proposing to actively promote it as a religious duty.&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">In Judaism blood donation is usually seen as a mitzvah, and even in traditional halachic circles it is viewed as something between what is permissible and what is obligatory. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">But Judaism has a curious, complex , ambivalent relationship to blood. And Reform Judaism more so. Most of the sections of Torah that Reform Jews in the UK read in its three-yearly cycle manage to avoid the blood – or at least the bloodiest parts of these sacred texts, where the writers describe the rituals that were a normal, regular part of the Temple cult. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Take this week’s sedrah, <i>T’zaveh</i>, which stretches from Exodus 27:20 to 30: 10. We never read the verses about the consecration of Aaron the High Priest and his sons, where a ram is killed ‘<i>and you take of its blood, and put it on the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and on the tip of the right ears of his sons, and on the thumb of their right hand, and on the big toe of their right foot, and then you splash the blood against the altar and round about. And then you take of the blood that is on the altar, and the anointing oil, and sprinkle it on Aaron and his garments, and on his sons and their garments, so that he and his garments shall be </i>kadosh<i>, holy, and his sons and their garments along with him’</i> (Exodus 29: 19-21). That holiness was achieved through this blood-based ritual is not something that (for better or worse) Reform Judaism wants us to be exposed to, or have to think about. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Next year, when we reach this sedrah, we will hear about the first part of the ritual, before the ram, which involves killing two bulls <i>‘before the Lord, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting’</i> (29:11), whereupon <i>‘you take some of the bull’s blood and put in on the horns of the altar with your finger, then pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar’ </i>(29:12).&nbsp; So even in the ‘edited highlights’ version of the Torah text that we read in Reform circles for this <i>parashah</i>, you can’t avoid the blood completely. But, on the whole, we omit these blood-soaked verses. Our tapestry of holiness has holes in it, so to speak. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Part of me approves of this. I do appreciate that Reform Judaism distances itself from some of these more problematic passages that the Torah contains: problematic in that they confront our modern sensibilities head-on. &nbsp;Historically, this goes right back to the origins of Reform Judaism in Germany, 200 years ago in Seesen, then Hamburg, then Berlin. Cuts were made in the liturgy to edit out all the traditional references to the Temple, and all the prayers which hoped for the restoration of the Temple, and its sacrifices. Not all the ancient Temple sacrifices and rites involved blood, the slaughter of animals and birds – but a lot of them did. This was a clear ideological move&nbsp; by the early Reformers : it wasn’t an evolution, it was a revolution - to drop the ancient hope for the rebuilding of the Temple. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And the Reform branch of Judaism has never deviated from this position, whether it was in Germany, or the United States, or here in the UK. Contrary to &nbsp;traditional strands of Judaism, we don’t pray for there to be a restored, Third Temple – thank God, I want to say. In fact we might pray that we hope we never see a Third Temple - particularly (but not only) because it would have to be built on the site currently occupied by the Dome of the Rock. And if Jews started to demolish that sacred building because of these archaic texts we wouldn’t see a Third Temple, we’d see a Third World War. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">So my Reform Jewish blood runs in opposition to that whole ancient cult of the Temple and its sacrifices and all that spilt animal blood.&nbsp;</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I am fine about studying these ancient texts as a part of the history of our people, I’m fine with finding ways – as the later rabbis always did – of interpreting them symbolically, but I’m convinced that our understanding of holiness has moved on, and the whole question of how an individual can be in a living relationship with God, with the divine,&nbsp; and how a people can be bound into a covenant with <i>Adonai,</i> the Holy One, I’m convinced that this quest for holiness now lies in a different direction from the blood rituals that these Torah texts hold dear. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">In other words I’m with Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, from the generation of rabbis that saw the Second Temple laid waste, who comforted his grieving colleague Rabbi Joshua. Joshua was distraught that ‘the place where the sins of Israel were atoned for is destroyed.’ ‘There’s no need to grieve’, said Rabbi Yochanan, ‘There’s another way to atonement and to be at-one with God as effective as the Temple: it is deeds of love and kindness. The prophet Hosea has already said’, says Yochanan, ‘that God tells us: “I desire mercy - and not sacrifices”’.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Another way to holiness as effective as the Temple – deeds of love and kindness. Rabbi Yochanan&nbsp; ben Zakkai – the first Reform Jew. He comforts his colleague by making the imaginative and spiritual leap – that ethical action is the way to serve God, to be close to God, to be bound into a covenantal relationship with God. Holiness doesn’t require blood to be spilled. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">But blood, the theme of blood in Judaism, has a way of seeping out. The word comes more than 350 times in the Hebrew Bible, and it is as integral to Jewish life as is the circulation of blood to our own bodies. And this omnipresence is made beautifully clear in a remarkable little exhibition now on – you can catch it until February 28th – at the Jewish Museum in Camden. It’s called simply ‘Blood’ with a subtitle ‘Reflections on what unites us and divides us’ and it made me think about the extent to which Judaism is pre-occupied with blood, historically and to this day. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The first mention of blood in the Bible is put into the mouth of God, and the context is an ominous one: ‘The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me’, says God to Cain after the murder of Abel. And blood keeps cropping up at key moments in the unfolding Biblical story – Joseph’s coat is torn off him and dipped in blood and taken back to the distraught Jacob, a symbol of its use to deceive; the blood of the paschal lamb smeared on the doorpost in Egypt is a sign of the Israelite homes, a symbol of its use to separate out the Hebrew people, and protect them. And then you have Sinai and all the laws of Judaism around blood. What areas of life does it impact on? Circumcision, kashrut, the laws of menstruation come immediately to mind. And there are sections in the exhibition devoted to all these. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And then there’s the way that Jewish identity has traditionally been passed on through the mother (at least until very recent&nbsp; changes in Liberal and then Reform Jewish practice), which effectively makes Judaism a religion that follows the blood line. This notion of ‘Jewish blood’ is a powerful fiction – but a fiction that in the 19<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup> centuries was given a veneer of pseudo-scientific&nbsp; respectability through eugenics, and as we know it was a fiction that ended up in genocide. Ironically, Jewish scientists were as enthusiastic in promoting theories of race as everyone else. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">One of the most chilling and provocative artefacts in the exhibition is the chart from 1935 of how the Nuremburg Laws, ‘For the Protection of German Blood and German Honour’ were to be implemented. It shows how marriages or sexual relationships between Germans and Jews were forbidden, but the chart shows how this question of racial purity through the blood line needed to be traced back to grandparents and great-grandparents in order to determine who was a kosher ‘German’, so to speak, and who wasn’t. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-js8fmZvGG5E/Vs25CGThRzI/AAAAAAAAACs/65A1ynJoS5U/s1600/Nuremberg%2Bpic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-js8fmZvGG5E/Vs25CGThRzI/AAAAAAAAACs/65A1ynJoS5U/s320/Nuremberg%2Bpic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right: -2.3pt;"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" o:spt="75" o:preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"/> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"/> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"/> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"/> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"/> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"/> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"/> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"/> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"/> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"/> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"/> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"/> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"/> </v:formulas> <v:path o:extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect"/> <o:lock v:ext="edit" aspectratio="t"/></v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75" style='width:770.25pt; height:302.25pt'> <v:imagedata src="file:///C:\Users\Howard\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.jpg" o:title="Scan0001"/></v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Nuremburg also features in the exhibition with a 15<sup>th</sup> century woodcut &nbsp;illustrating the medieval blood libel – one of the central themes of the exhibition is the way in which so much of the fraught relationship between Jews and Christians centres on blood. There is a real psychological drama within Christianity rooted in the experience of, as it were, drinking blood - through the wine’s transubstantiation, Christ’s blood is made present. This is a kind of horror story dressed up as religious ritual. Incidentally, I think that the blood libel is a projection of this horror onto Jews, who are accused of using blood, Christian blood,&nbsp; in rituals like matzah baking. In a related crime, it is Jews who attack the wafers used in Mass and make blood come out of them – host-desecration - and the exhibition also illustrates this lesser-known part of the history of Christian hostility to Jews around the theme of blood. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4Q1oyTnZ72E/Vs26Cl1uqKI/AAAAAAAAAC0/WeocwqvwiRI/s1600/Scan0002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="464" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4Q1oyTnZ72E/Vs26Cl1uqKI/AAAAAAAAAC0/WeocwqvwiRI/s640/Scan0002.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">So there’s lots to look at there, lots to ponder on – and I haven’t mentioned the section on vampires and Dracula and the Jewish connections to them, including the box of breakfast cereal produced in 1987 in the US called Count Chocula, with a jokey box illustration of Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula with a Magen David around his neck – the makers recalled the product after a threat of legal action from the Anti-Defamation&nbsp; League.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G25grgyFh3c/Vs26iA7-UpI/AAAAAAAAAC4/6eL82TFB8jk/s1600/IMG_20160127_121938483.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G25grgyFh3c/Vs26iA7-UpI/AAAAAAAAAC4/6eL82TFB8jk/s320/IMG_20160127_121938483.jpg" width="179" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">But the trope of Jewish blood-suckers goes back a thousand years: it takes in the history of usury and goes right up to the anti-Semitic cartoons of </span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 13.5pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;frm=1&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;sqi=2&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiexc27u47LAhXGORoKHQCSDJ4QFggcMAA&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDer_St%25C3%25BCrmer&amp;usg=AFQjCNFIVGu2IayL7hPmy6Zl3q0rWMRALw&amp;bvm=bv.114733917,d.d2s"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">Der Stürmer</span><span style="color: blue; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;"> </span></a></span><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">which you can also see at the Museum. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Once you have been to this provocative and informative exhibition you can’t help but notice how central is this theme of blood to so many aspects of Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish ritual life, Jewish social life, positively and negatively. It’s integral to the tribal identity of Judaism – and it’s part of the rhetoric and iconography of anti-semitism through the ages. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Reform Judaism may shy away from some of its manifestations, it may edit out some of the Torah’s more difficult texts, it may have a more relaxed attitude to kashrut, menstruation rites, even circumcision – it may want to concentrate on the ethics and the spirituality – but I have a nagging suspicion that this is cheating us of some of the richness, the complexity, the ambiguity of our long and bloody history. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The Jewish story has blood running in its veins just as Jews have blood running in their veins.&nbsp; Shakespeare , as so often, said it best: ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ The Merchant of Venice is a play about blood, Christian blood and Jewish blood, and what these phrases/concepts really mean, or if they mean anything at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Do you think there’s such a thing as ‘Jewish blood’? Even if you don’t, most of the world does.&nbsp; I sometimes think that Reform Judaism would like to promote itself as a bloodless religion, a religion of ethical living and celebration and gentle religious observance , a religion of the mind and the soul, and the heart – as long as the heart is a metaphor.&nbsp; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">But if we turn away from the reality, the physicality, the oozing, flowing, coagulating viscosity of actual blood – human blood and animal blood - that courses through the veins&nbsp; of Jewish life and Jewish texts and Jewish myth and Jewish history, I suspect it will come back, vampire-like, to bite us. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p>&nbsp;[<b>based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, February 20th, 2016]</b></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-39303014383274765312016-01-10T17:08:00.000+00:002016-01-10T17:08:21.550+00:00Clinging On For Dear Life <span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Servitude to tyrants is always oppressive. Hardship after hardship, year in year out, the never-ending horizonless drudgery batters the body and scars the soul. Dictators come and dictators go, but for the ordinary person in a totalitarian regime, the story is always the same. Any regime where personal freedoms are rigorously circumscribed is interchangeable with any other regime where human freedoms are restricted or repressed. Across time, through history, the daily lot of what used to be called ‘the common man’ – that is you and me – was a matter of brute survival: you had to get to the end of the day, you needed some food to eat, somewhere to lay your head, in the endless rounds of birth, copulation and death that made up one’s life. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Hebrew people in Egypt are the archetype of this kind of servitude to the ruling powers – but their story, our story, has been endlessly repeated up until our own times: whether it is peasants in medieval Europe or serfs on vast Russian estates or pre-emancipation black slavery in the Americas or the victims of Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or apartheid South Africa, or Assad’s starving victims today in Syria, ordinary human suffering has been the norm for the majority of humanity through the ages. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Much of this depth of pain is probably unimaginable to us, unless we choose to study history or read fictional representations of it in novels. Sometimes there’s a film that tries to evoke it – Twelve Years a Slave was a recent Hollywood effort. But most of these stories from the past have sunk into the vast abyss of silence that is time gone by. It is all lost: the pain, the humiliation, the meaninglessness of empty, abused lives, generation after generation, century after century, all of it swallowed up in the ruthless jaws of time. There are few written records of the inside history of human suffering through most of recorded time, and in truth little wish in many of us to know about the cruelty and callousness of the past. We have enough problems of our own to be getting on with – or so we feel. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">So when we do read – as we are doing at the moment in the annual cycle of Torah readings - about the Israelite slavery in Egypt we both can and can’t relate to it. In one way it has the feel of fiction: it’s a legend of a people’s origins written generations later based partly on folk memory, and as we read it has the feel of an extended fable being constructed to conform to a specific ethno-religious worldview. It’s not ‘history’ as we now think of it. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We heard last week how the Egyptian god-king, the Pharaoh, responds to the request by Moses and Aaron that the people should be allowed to have three days off work to go and offer sacrifices to their god in the wilderness. The Torah text dramatises this with a direct ‘quotation’, as it were, from Pharaoh, speaking to Israel’s spokesmen: ‘Why are you distracting the people? Get them back to work!’ (Exodus 5:4). And he then instructs his minions to stop providing the Israelites with straw to make the bricks: ‘Let them gather the straw for themselves’, he orders, ‘but make sure they make the same quota of bricks as before...they’re shirkers/slackers <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nirphim</i>’ (verses 7-8). Or as Iain Duncan Smith might translate it: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>‘Work-shy scroungers’ – those who have to be made to work for free in compulsory work-placements in order to get any benefits. It’s the same mentality, across time. The same language. (But I digress).&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We recognise that the random punitiveness of the powers-that-be in our Torah story is part of a literary saga; it’s not a verbatim account even though it’s told with dialogue in it. Yet it still has the ring of truthfulness because we can find exact parallels in history of such brutality: in Soviet Russia, in the Nazi labour camps, on the 19<sup>th</sup> century cotton plantations, in Maoist collective farms in the 1950s and 60s. This has happened to people over and over again, people like us. On the one hand it’s just a story, in an ancient religious text – and we don’t believe these texts are actual historical records – but as we listen to it we realise we are reading something that transcends its time and place, that points towards something that isn’t just foundational to Jewish collective experience but is also universal. The narratives of degradation of what man can do to man is a universal story. And the Jewish people tell it and retell it, because it is our particular story - but also because it is our collective human story. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">I wanted to write this week about something else. I looked at the allocated Torah text (Exodus 6:2 onwards), which starts: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I am <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adonai</i> – YHWH – but I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">El Shaddai</i>; my name <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adonai</i>wasn’t known to them... </b>And I thought: ‘I want to talk about the evolution of God, and how our thinking about God might be changing, is changing, in our own times’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Don’t we see that process of evolution already at work in our text? The narrators have ‘God’ say, as it were: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘In days gone by, those patriarchs you’ve heard about, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they knew about the divine in their own way, they called me El Shaddai <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>– ‘God of Breasts’ – because they experienced me as nurturing them, like a mother, they felt me as intimately involved in their personal lives, their family lives, they felt me outside them yet closely enmeshed with their daily life... </i></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">They didn’t know me as Adonai, YHWH, the energy that animates all of being, they didn’t know me as the spirit of life itself, the power that generates life itself, all of life, including their life, moment by moment. They couldn’t think of me that way. They weren’t ready to think about me that way...</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>But now they are. This is what they need to understand now. And it’s a quantum leap forward, it’s a paradigm shift in consciousness that is required of them. To move from slavery to freedom, from drudgery where you just try and survive the day, to the liberation of having lives of hope and purpose, lives that you can shape and that have meaning beyond sheer survival, this Israelite people need to connect to me as Adonai, YHWH, the energy that animates the universe and all of being, and that offers a vision of how people should live, could live, a moral vision...</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>They need to take their noses off the grindstone, they need to be freed from the grindstone, and look up and out to what they could become as a people, they need to connect in a living way to that ancient promise that they are to become a blessing to others, a blessing to themselves. I, Adonai , am going to free them from their limited slave lives and mentalities and give them a real purpose, a task, a destiny - to be a holy people, a people attuned to the sacred nature of life, of all life.’ </span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Anyway, I was going to talk about all this. And move on to describe the next quantum leap, and paradigm shift, that we are in the middle of. But what I found myself thinking about and writing about was not ‘God but suffering – about tyranny and hardship and how much of human history has been a tale of degradation and oppression and despair. And it still is. And in the light of that, to talk about ‘God’ and ‘the divine’ and ‘a sacred spirit that animates all of being’ seems just nonsense, a mockery of human experience, a kind of blasphemy against the felt realities of so much human life, in the past and in the present. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">We know from our own lives the gap between our Jewish theology (for want of a better word) and the stuff of our own lives. When we are in pain, when we are facing death, or the death of someone we love, when we see tragedy in the world outside us, or face tragedy and loss close to home, then we wonder: what is this God-talk all about really? How can we believe in a loving, caring, nurturing God, a God who supports us, who has compassion as his middle name? Life can mock, cruelly, our wish to believe in this kind of a personal God, let alone a God who is a Creator, or a Revealer, or a Redeemer, a God who is part of the unfolding of history, as the story of Exodus suggests, a God who frees an oppressed people ‘with an outstretched arm and with mighty judgments’ (6: 6). Human suffering, individual and collective, is an ongoing rebuke to this kind of thinking about God. It is what turns many people off religion, and understandably so. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And yet what is remarkable when you look back through history, is the power this Exodus story has had specifically in the history of oppressed people. It has allowed millions and millions of people for a millennium and more to endure extreme hardship, individually and collectively - because it offers a story of hope: you might be living in darkness and desperation now, but God has saved a people from oppression in the past and can do so again; this is God’s nature – to be on the side of the weak against the strong, to be on the side of justice rather than siding with those who sustain systems of injustice. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This story in the Hebrew Bible has kept Jews going in dark times, of course, times of oppression and exile. But it’s also been inspirational for Christians: from Negro spirituals that defied the 19<sup>th</sup> century slave-masters to the civil rights campaigners in the 1960s to the South American liberation theologians who helped people resist dictatorships to the secret Christian gatherings in Communist China, this story, our story, has been a spiritual resource for oppressed people through the generations, and it still is. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ironically, Arab Christians look to this story as speaking of the inevitability that justice will one day overcome injustice in Israel and Palestine. And those medieval peasants and Russian serfs might have been deeply anti-Semitic but they still looked to the God who freed the Israelite people from bondage as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a direct and personal source of comfort and hope in the midst of their desperately impoverished lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader of the dissenting Confessing Church in Germany in the 1930s, part of the political opposition to Hitler, was hung in a concentration camp in 1945, but he never wavered in his teaching and preaching and belief that the Exodus story was a paradigm for the final triumph of goodness over the evil of Hitler’s oppressive regime. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">All these examples are a testimony to the power of the story, the way it incarnates for all time the hope that tyranny and injustice do not last forever. And it is a story that lost its religious trappings but retained its spiritual core for all those hundreds of thousands of Jews who threw off the shackles, as they experienced it, of religious orthodoxy, but poured their inherited belief that there was<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>a power in history that was on the side of the oppressed, and that oppressive systems could be overthrown - they poured that faith, transformed it, into Marxism and messianic socialism at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century.&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The history of 20<sup>th</sup>century socialism is the history of Exodus theology metamorphosed into secular redemptive politics. And that so much of it turned sour is of course prefigured in the very Hebrew Bible those passionate Jewish rebels so eagerly rejected – the way in which in later Israelite history over and over again the people find themselves victims of new forms of oppression – from outsiders, or from their own kings or leaders. The failure to build the kingdom of God here on earth, stretches from the time of Solomon to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and on, and on. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">And yet the Exodus story never stops spinning its web of hope over successive generations: its power comes from its insistence that there is, there has to be, a force in human history that helps us move from oppression to liberation, from tyrannies of suffering and lives of quiet desperation to societies of justice and individual well-being. There has to be some force, it says – and call it godly if you want, as the Bible does – that helps us move in that direction. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">But whether that ‘God’ is outside us, or actually a part of ourselves, an energy in us, an inner force that gives us strength and helps form our vision and helps us transform the world around us - this is what we need to talk about in this paradigm shift that we are, in our generation, in the midst of. It’s where the conversation about God needs to go now (and the implications of this are huge) if we are going to make it through on this fragile planet we all cling to - cling on to ‘for dear life’, as we so fondly say. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, January 9<sup>th</sup>, 2016]<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-30767183290259083602015-12-13T20:20:00.001+00:002015-12-13T20:20:21.063+00:00Paris: 'Twixt Cup and Lip <span style="font-family: Calibri;">My father was fond of proverbs, pieces of folk wisdom that served as substitutes for a more sustained conversation. ‘A stitch in time saves nine’. ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. ‘A bad workman blames his tools’. And – the one that I woke up thinking about today - ‘There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip’. For me as a child, these sayings took on an authority indistinguishable from his own. Yet looking back on them now, what strikes me is how they all, in varying degrees, encoded an attitude of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">caution</i> in the face of the world. I never heard him say, for example, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’ – which might have given permission for a more adventurous stance on life. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The climate change agreement signed in Paris is being hailed - by the politicians involved, and some environmental advocacy groups – as a ‘historic’ turning point in humanity’s use and abuse of fossil fuels. The intention of the agreement is clear: the commitment of all major nations – including for the first time China and India - to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2030. But how will that translate into action? While every country is required to put forward a plan to cut emissions, there is no legal requirement as to how, or how much, each country must cut. What’s legally binding is that each nation enact legislation in relation to a low-carbon future, but what is voluntary seems to be the content of that legislation. ’Twixt cup and lip there’s an ocean of room for countries to slip away from the high ideals that have gained assent over these last few weeks.&nbsp;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The agreement seems to be designed to shame countries into action through peer pressure: countries have to legally monitor, verify and report on what they are doing, reconvening every five years to publicly report on progress towards lowering emissions. One can only hope that that this agreement – ‘Climate Change Agreement In Our Time’ – is not looked back on in decades to come, as temperatures continue to rise, albeit marginally slower, as the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s infamous ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement with Hitler in 1938. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As the festival of Hanukkah comes to an end, and one by one the last of the candles flickers and dies, the fable of the Temple oil sufficient for one day that miraculously lasted for eight days comes to mind. Jews have often used this legend as a symbol of the triumph of Jewish continuity in the face of forces that have sought to extinguish it. But maybe a more apposite reading of the story for our time would be to recognise that what would be truly miraculous – and worthy of celebration – would be if the nations of the world could find a way of consuming less and making what we have go further. But this would be a model – self-sacrifice in the service of a common good - that would overturn capitalism as it's always been practiced. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">As long as the nations that are celebrating in Paris today are wedded to consumerism and growth – and as long as electricity, gas and oil companies have such a dominant place in the world’s stock markets – it is going to be very much business as usual. The Paris agreement is a triumph of presentation over reality. There is no pleasure in saying that, and it is probably better to have reached this agreement than to have repeated the failures in Copenhagen in 2009. But it is a consoling fable for our times, and in the depths of winter we cling to such fables, light in our darkness. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our planet is still vulnerable and dependent – like the infant in the Christmas story which also speaks a universal truth at this season. Over these next decades we are going to find ourselves <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>’twixt cup and lip – between the good intentions of Paris and the complex actions that are still needed, and which will have to be maintained over decades when the impact of already-existing higher temperatures will be leading to greater and greater devastation. This will require faith of a very high order. Until less becomes the new more, I am letting caution be my guide. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8457067560968597598.post-71132945672476429392015-11-14T20:21:00.001+00:002015-11-20T21:22:05.951+00:00Art as a Response to Terror<span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">The murderous attacks in Paris remind us – as if we don’t already know – that while 20<sup>th</sup>century secular ideologies spawned the death cults of Stalin, Mao and Hitler, 20<sup>th</sup> century religious fundamentalism has spilled into the 21<sup>st</sup>century with a technologically-savvy nihilistic death cult masquerading as a version of Islam. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">Today I want to turn away, very deliberately, from this assault on the civilised values I treasure and share something uplifting for the spirit, something that speaks <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">en passant</i> of creative responses to war and terror and hatred. Every generation faces the challenge of making something beautiful, and of lasting value, in the face of the upheavals and horrors that are always with us. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">If you haven’t already seen it, can I recommend a gem of an exhibition that’s on right now in Somerset House on the Strand in London? It is sponsored by the Ben Uri Gallery &amp; Museum, and closes on 13<sup>th</sup> December, and it’s certainly worth an hour or so of your time. I want to say a few things about it because if you do visit it I can guarantee (I think) that you will come out of it feeling, in several ways, blessed. It’s called ‘Out of Chaos’ and celebrates a century of Jewish émigré life through some of the key works of the Ben Uri collection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">The Ben Uri was founded as an arts society in Whitechapel in 1915 – so it is 100 years old and they are celebrating that through this exhibition. In just<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>half a dozen smallish rooms you journey through the last century of Jewish artistic engagement with British life and European history - and the whole of what the 20<sup>th</sup> century brought into being, for good and ill.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">At the end of the 19<sup>th</sup>century there were already Anglo-Jewish artists here in the UK, exploring the themes of integration and identity; and they were joined at the turn of the century by European Jewish artists, men and women who came as immigrants to the East End of London and wanted to preserve and record Jewish traditions and Yiddish-speaking identities within this new environment. Out of this rich mix there arose the so-called ‘Whitechapel Boys’ – a group of Jewish artists who were at the cutting edge of new developments in artistic modernism. Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg (who was also a poet, and died aged 27 in the trenches) were responding to the artistic and technological revolutions that were going on throughout Europe (especially in Paris), an era which overlapped with the traumas of the First World War. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">I want to share with you a couple of paintings you can find in the exhibition in the second room which focuses on the themes of this period. One is Bomberg’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Racehorses</i> (1913) </span></span></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kTQfCiOPXdk/Vk-MRyAMBjI/AAAAAAAAACI/3MCcB8iBTuA/s1600/bomberg__racehorses_mid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kTQfCiOPXdk/Vk-MRyAMBjI/AAAAAAAAACI/3MCcB8iBTuA/s400/bomberg__racehorses_mid.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-size: 14pt;"></span>&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">which was met with incomprehension and hostility when it was first seen. The Jewish Chronicle, then as now an occasional <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>bastion of unreflective prejudices, dismissed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Racehorses</i> as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>‘opposed to all that is rational in art’ because it displayed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>‘horses that could never possibly win races’. That’s true: the subject is as conventional as you can get, but the artist strips it of conventional detail and gives you the animals in a mechanistic whirl of frozen movement, a rush of stiff-jointed angles; these horses haven’t got four legs they have 20 legs. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">Almost like a woodcut, one sees the influence of Cubism and Futurism, and of those famous photographs of horses in motion by Edweard Muybridge. What Bomberg produced here, as a precocious 22 year-old, is a dazzling avant-garde experiment in an age coming to be dominated by machines, the spirit of which suffuses the work. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">Bomberg’s work influenced that of a second of those Whitechapel Boys. Let’s look at Mark Gertler’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Merry-Go-Round </i>(1916). </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GUO0iFEAmUA/Vk-NWqp27jI/AAAAAAAAACQ/-DHU1zImKHM/s1600/Mark_Gertler_-_Merry-Go-Round_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GUO0iFEAmUA/Vk-NWqp27jI/AAAAAAAAACQ/-DHU1zImKHM/s320/Mark_Gertler_-_Merry-Go-Round_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" width="243" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"></span></span>&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">This work – now in the Tate Britain - was originally owned by the Ben Uri until it was sold by them in 1984 to guarantee the gallery’s future. It was completed in the third year of the War and captures the nightmare of the conflict: the carousel (modelled on the one on Hampstead Heath) is frozen in motion, the fairground horses carrying uniformed soldiers and sailors and their sweethearts whirls round and round, the mouths of the riders wide open in an unending scream. D.H. Lawrence called the painting ‘horrifying and terrible’ – which it is: there is horror and terror etched into the faces of these riders caught up in a dizzying endless circuit – and thought it ‘the best <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">modern</i>picture I have seen’; and said that Gertler had given us a ‘real and ultimate revelation’. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">It stands comparison with Picasso’s Guernica as a defiantly anti-war protest – at the beginning of the War Gertler registered as a conscientious objector, though he tried to sign up later but was declared medically unfit - and in some ways it strikes me as even more powerful that Guernica because it captures the glee and helplessness with which the participants are caught up in the action. The carousel evokes both the jauntiness of the mood in which soldiers set off to do their bit for King and Country, but also the machine-like mechanical nature of the conflict. The horses’ back legs are shaped like raised rifles, the clouds are like shells falling from the sky, the red, white and blue of the British flag glow as the excitement of the War becomes the fearfulness of war and the whirligig jollity merges into the frozen screams from which no-one can escape. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">As Lawrence intuited, something new is being revealed here, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the artist was Jewish. This has always been part of the Jewish ‘mission’ – to look into a society from the margins and offer a commentary on what is seen. This is not always, as you can imagine, a popular position to take up. Gertler’s painting was still unsold at the time of his death in 1939. But now we can see that it is a masterpiece. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">One of the things this exhibition does is to remind us of the enormous contribution Jews have made over the last 100 years to the cultural life of the nation. At a time when issues of asylum and the UK’s role in offering a welcome to refugees is at the forefront of the political agenda, spending time with some of the glories of Anglo-Jewish art , often created by Jewish immigrants and émigrés,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>is a salutary reminder of what so-called ‘outsiders’ can offer their host nation. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">Further rooms at the exhibition offer key works by a range of British and European Jews – from Chagall to Frank Auerbach, Jacob Epstein to R.B.Kitaj, Leon Kossof and Joseph Herman to Max Liebermann – exploring issues of identity and migration during the era of Nazi Germany and the post-War period. And there is some very powerful contemporary photographs by Israeli and British Jewish artists towards the end of the exhibition.&nbsp;</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">Let me talk about just one work from the middle section of the exhibition, Joseph Herman’s ‘Refugees’ from 1941. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rxAvQb8xqz0/Vk-OnqHBQDI/AAAAAAAAACY/Kp4jIy5oBIU/s1600/refugees.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rxAvQb8xqz0/Vk-OnqHBQDI/AAAAAAAAACY/Kp4jIy5oBIU/s320/refugees.jpg" width="269" /></a></div>&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">Herman was born in Warsaw in 1911 into a poor, working-class family. He became a graphic artist and in 1938 fled the rising tide of anti-semitism – first to Brussels and then, when the Germans invaded, he was able to get to the UK, to Glasgow where he learned quite quickly through the Red Cross that his entire family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. He’d already started a series of works on Jewish themes and these portraits of a disappearing world darkened to include pogroms and the destruction of the Ghetto.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>He moved to London in 1943 where he held his first London exhibition together with a little known Northern artist called L.S.Lowry. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">This painting, ‘Refugees’, was thought lost for over 60 years, and was re-discovered only after his death in 2000. It’s a haunting work and although you can see the spires of a lost moonlit snow-bound Warsaw it evokes a much wider east European story of displacement and exile - and is of course utterly contemporary. A family is on the move, carrying their bedding with them: father , mother, child and baby, their eyes wide with fear and panic. A universal story of upheaval and flight. The threatening nature of their unknown fate is symbolised by the huge cat squeezing the life out of the bloodied mouse. The cold indifference of the moon’s eye, picked up in the cat’s eye, looks down on one family - which stand for so many, then and now. It’s powerful, poignant, frightening, moving – Herman has created a deeply human work of identification with the oppressed, a humanistic and of course deeply Jewish portrait of suffering and exile and loss. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">This capacity for human fellow-feeling became a dominant motif in Herman’s work: he eventually made his home in a Welsh mining village and made his name with his dignified and empathetic portraits of miners, which remain some of his best-known works. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">There are nearly 70 works on show, taken from the Ben Uri collection, and each one deserves its own time and space. The Ben Uri has recently re-defined its purpose: it recognises that these Jewish themes of identity and immigration, of forced journeys and necessary integration, are part of a larger conversation in this country in which the rich contribution of immigrant cultures needs to be exhibited and celebrated. They have hosted in recent years exhibitions by African, Korean and Caribbean artists and they have a real vision of being (though they don’t put it this way) a source of blessing to other peoples, using the special nature of Jewish experience to enlighten, to educate, to inspire. If you go along to Somerset House I think you will leave this current exhibition moved and exhilarated, humbled and inspired. Don’t miss it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London on November 14<sup>th</sup> 2105]</span></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;"><em>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></em></span></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: &quot;calibri&quot;;">&nbsp;</span></o:p></span></div>Howard Cooperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07499147712266456601noreply@blogger.com2